Teeth
by Knackard
Summary: Leah can't decide if she'd rather fight Nahuel to the death or screw his beautiful brains out. Fortunately for her, he's not about to make her choose. The wholly unwholesome tale of a woman with a nightmare past and the man who just might be turning her into a werewolf. Rated M for violence and shameless indecency.
1. Some Nightmares You Never Wake Up From

**If you've read _Long Long Long_ and _Living in the Sun_, you have all the backstory you need for _Teeth_. If not, I'm sure you'll still be able to follow what's going on, but just to make it easier to read this without having read the others, I've included some backstory in an A/N at the bottom of this chapter. Thanks for being here, dudes.**

* * *

><p>Leah is sobbing uncontrollably into her pillow when her phone buzzes. She has to stare at it for several long seconds before her brain believes her eyes.<p>

It's Jake.

The last time they spoke on the phone was six months ago or more, and it was a terse, distracted conversation, because he was busy with his new life doing whatever, wherever. Since then it's been texts, short ones usually, just to make sure they're both still alive.

She's stopped expecting a call. Whatever pride she has left has prevented her from calling him. She made the call last time, and it was awkward, boring, brief.

She swallows and grits her teeth to get her voice under control, and answers the phone.

"Hey, Lee," he says, and at the sound of his voice she's sobbing again. "Want me to come over?"

She doesn't manage a response, but he comes over anyway, with a lot of beer and six bags of different kinds of chips, and four dips, and two salsas. She didn't even know he was back on the rez. Hell, she didn't even know he was in the country.

Leah's mom is at work and her dad is at Charlie Swan's house; in a couple of days, probably, they will both remember that tonight was the anniversary of the event that nearly destroyed their daughter, and they will feel terrible for leaving her alone. But Leah doesn't care. She waits for Jake in darkness, all lights turned off so that she can pretend she is somewhere else, somewhen else, someone else.

When Jake arrives they sit on the couch, lit only by moonlight through the screen door, and Jake yanks the tops off of two beer bottles with his bare hands. He passes her one beer and clinks the other against it, and says,

"To Dad and Sam and Emily and Claire and Jared."

Leah downs her beer in one go. It's been a year since the La Push Killings, and her life is no less over now than it was when she got the first call.

* * *

><p>Leah actually thought, when her mother called her, weeping too hard to say more than Em's dead, that this was it: her life was over. Emily might as well have been her sister, they were so close. Emily was her best friend, easily as much her soul mate as Sam was. Leah spent the night with Sam, and they held each other and cried, and Leah did not know how she could bear this much pain.<p>

Two days after that, her dad informed her with tears on his cheeks that Claire, Emily's niece and a flower girl in Sam's and Leah's upcoming wedding, had also been found dead. Claire had been tiny, just a toddler, very excited about the pretty dress that had been bought for her and very, very serious about her flower girl duties. And Leah, who had never really stopped crying in the whole two days since learning of Emily's murder, sobbed until her nose bled.

She spent the next night drinking with Sam and his best friend, Jared Cameron. They were both pretty big guys, tall, built, and it made her feel safe to sit with them in Jared's mom's basement, with all the lights on, being sad and being scared. She cried on Sam's shoulder.

Three days after that, a local man's dog went into some bushes to fetch a thrown stick and came out with part of a leg bone belonging to Jared. Sam was found in a stream a few miles away, not far from Leah's house.

Even then, her life wasn't over. She thought it was, but it wasn't. Not yet. Not completely.

A week later, Uncle Bill was found dead in his home. Uncle Bill, who couldn't lay eyes on Leah without inquiring of the the universe whether she was ever going to stop getting prettier. Uncle Bill, who told her the Facts of Life because he knew her mother wouldn't do the subject justice. Uncle Bill, her second father, her favorite elder, her lodestar.

Jake was nowhere to be found, and Leah knew then that he was dead.

When Jake turned up safe and sound eleven days later, Leah didn't believe it. She didn't believe it was Jake, or if it was, she didn't believe he was alive. If Uncle Bill was dead, if Sam and Jared and Claire and Emily were dead, Jake must be dead too. Seth must be dead. Her mom and dad must be dead. Everyone was dead, murdered in what newspapers were calling "suspicious grizzly attacks". Everyone was dead, murdered, eaten, digested, shit out, gone, forever.

Most of all Leah. She just hadn't stopped twitching yet.

Seth no longer felt safe in his own home, on his own turf. He didn't say it; it didn't need to be said. But after a while his grades started slipping too badly to ignore, and it was agreed between him, their parents and Leah that he would finish out the school year with some Makah cousins, maybe staying on through the next year as well. Leah felt he made the right choice. If things had been different, she would have insisted that the family stay together, but what point was there in that when serial murderering grizzly bears could just split you up anyway, without warning? No, it was better that Seth eke out the last of his childhood somewhere safe, away from this place. Away from Leah, even. She was no good for him now, or for anyone. She'd have to be mad to blame him for leaving.

For her part, Leah did not feel safe at home anymore either, but she also didn't really care if her body was found in a stream, all her blood rinsed away. After several months passed and there were no new killings, Leah did not think she was likely to get so lucky.

* * *

><p>In the months directly following the murders, after he returned from his almost-two-week walkabout, Jake took up residence with Leah and her parents, keeping odd hours, being secretive and miserable. Jake never told anyone what he got up to, but he and Leah sat together in her room, listening to music, not usually talking. Sometimes Leah drifted off still sitting up, her feet tucked under Jake. When she dozed, she dreamed: dreamed that Sam and Emily and Claire and Uncle Bill and Jared and Jake were all still alive and well. The waking was terrible, and it usually took Jake some minutes to prove to her that actually, he <em>was<em> still alive. Technically.

Only once in this period did Leah feel something like life flowing through her veins. Her mother was in the kitchen, quietly crying into the beans she was fixing for supper. Dad was at work. Jake and Leah were pretending to watch TV.

"God, this sucks," Jake was muttering. Leah lifted an eyebrow.

"You're telling me," she said.

"I mean," said Jake, "like, I get it. Sometimes life hands you lemons."

"Lemons are full of acid," noted Leah. "Life gives you acid."

"And you just have to...get by, I guess. I mean, I get that."

"If you can," qualified Leah.

"But shit, she didn't even _think_ about it. Just fucking took it. Took everything. She wanted to be rich and beautiful and young forever and now she is, but only because she's dead."

"Emily _never_ wanted _that_," contradicted Leah.

"Emily?" Jake echoed, blinking at her.

"And Em wasn't rich," she added. "Beautiful and young and dead, yeah. But not rich." One hot tear squeezes out of the corner of her eye, but she blinks it back.

"I'm talking about Bella," said Jake.

"The fuck is Bella?"

"Um, Swan? Like, Chief Swan's daughter?"

Leah stared at Jake. "You're talking about Charlie Swan's bratty kid?" she said. "I thought you were talking about Em."

"No. And she's not bratty. Don't call her that."

"You just said she wanted to be dead and rich," pointed out Leah. "Sounds bratty to me. But hey, I don't know 'er. Whatever."

"She's _not bratty_," insisted Jake, his face suffusing red. "Don't you dare say that about her. She has had shit to deal with like you wouldn't _believe_. There's more to this. I know there is. There _has_ to be. And I just let her leave. Fuck, I made her leave. God, I suck."

"Calm down, Jake—"

"No, _you_ calm down," Jake shouted. He threw himself at her, swatted at her head, brought Mom running in from the kitchen, then ran out of the house like a cat with its tail on fire.

"What happened?" said Mom, looking after him.

"No idea," said Leah dully. "Whatever, he'll be back."

But he wasn't. Jake didn't come back. Left his bed unslept in, barely took any of his belongings, just vanished. He didn't call, and he responded to Leah's texts in brief, uncommunicative bursts. He was gone from her house, gone from her family, gone from her life.

Just gone. Like everyone else.

And _that_ was when Leah's life was well and truly over.

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><p>Leah spent the long months that followed Jake's disappearance in nearly total isolation, dropping out of her classes at Peninsula College, ignoring her school friends' texts until her phone went silent altogether. She did not dare love anyone, ever again. She did not have the nerve.<p>

When Jake reappeared nine months later, he was changed. He smiled his sweet Jake smile of yore, and hugged prolifically, and was not dead at all, not even inside like she was. He moved into his dad's house. Leah didn't understand how he could do it, how he could choose to live in the house where his own father was murdered, even if it did have a porch and an attic and lack a mortgage. She still can't step foot in the part of the woods where Sam's mangled corpse was found, drained of blood by the flowing water. Emily and Claire Young had been found in a different part of the rez. No one knows why _they_ were drained of blood. Or Jared. Or Uncle Bill.

"It's an ongoing investigation," was all Chief Swan would say about it. If Leah wants closure, she's going to have to get it somewhere else. But she doesn't want closure. She doesn't care.

Jake offered to let Leah move in with him. Could she live in the very home where Uncle Bill was murdered? Then again, could she bear to stay put, sitting on the couch that she and Sam used to make out on, walking through the garden where Emily was teaching her to grow her own wedding bouquet? She couldn't bring herself to get rid of her wedding dress, which hung ghostlike in her closet and mocked her every time she reached for a jacket. Nor could she bear to put away the dozens of framed photos of her and Em, in all stages of life, which lined the walls of the whole house.

It was a no-brainer, in the end. She lacked the backbone to throw out all the things that reminded her of _them_, to salt Emily's garden, to burn Sam's couch; but she had just enough backbone to move out and live with Jake instead.

She took some books with her, some clothes, her pillow, her engagement ring. She took shoes and her toothbrush and her withering sadness. She took her memories and left behind all the evidence that she had ever been happy.

* * *

><p>Now Leah has a meaningless, zombie-like job at a shoe store in town. Retail is easy. The customers are intimidated by her and her coworkers dislike her and her manager finds her difficult, but they can't fire her because they have a diversity quota to fill and everyone else who works there is white. Jake won't let her pay any of the utility bills, so she's actually able to start saving up her paychecks. Eventually, she may save up enough to resume following her dreams to become a vet, assuming she can manage anything so ambitious as having dreams again.<p>

It's easy for Leah to live on Ramen, since she lost her appetite a year ago and never really got it back. Jake buys all communal necessities. She asks him where he gets all this money, but he never answers her.

Jake has changed.

He hit a serious growth spurt just before he bailed the last time, and now he's tall and fit and adult-looking. But his looks aren't the reason he never gets carded even though he's only seventeen: he's become self-assured, confident, articulate. He doesn't act like a kid who lost both his parents too young, too traumatically. He acts like a young man who's going places. He has left Leah behind, quite spectacularly so.

* * *

><p>"Lee?" Jake prods a drifting Leah. She blinks and sits up, her mouth sticky, her brain half-asleep. "Can I ask you something?"<p>

"Shoot." Leah stretched, cracks her back, tugs on all her fingers, flexes her toes.

"What do you do all day? I mean, like, when I'm gone."

"Work," says Leah, picking aimlessly at a thread that has come loose from the couch cushion

"You don't work every day," says Jake. "And even if you did, you only work for what, like, eight hours at a go? What else do you do?"

"Dunno. Watch TV?" Leah says it like it's a question, because it is. She doesn't know what she does. She doesn't notice. "What do you do? You're never here during the day. Where do you go?"

"Just around," says Jake, as vague as Leah. And they say no more about it.

Leah joins her mom and dad and Seth for Christmas. It's horrible. Seth is missing his friends, and girlfriend, from his new school. It doesn't surprise Leah that he's made new friends, or that he loves his new life, or that everyone up there loves him. She's relieved. Glad that she no longer has to worry about him. He'll be fine.

Her mom gives her a scrapbook she made, packed with photos of Leah with Em, Leah with Sam, Leah with Uncle Bill. Sue sits on the couch, tears in her eyes, already healing from the scars that have been inflicted on not just Leah but the whole Clearwater family. The whole rez. She reaches out to embrace her daughter, so they can cry and heal together.

Leah jerks out of her mother's reach and walks out the front door, down the street, and all the way to Uncle Bill's house, two miles away. She doesn't slam the door and she doesn't break into a run and she doesn't give any indication that she hears her mother sobbing and calling after her. She leaves the album.

Jake isn't at home, so Leah takes two Unisoms and passes out. She puts herself to sleep over the next few days, almost continually, until the year is over and a new one begins.

* * *

><p>Leah and Jake sit together in his living room watching reality TV and consuming Natural Light. They drink their first beers in silence. Then Leah asks what Jake's been up to, and he says not much, tells her he's expecting a visitor in the next couple days, assures Leah she won't be inconvenienced, and they drink their second watery beers in silence.<p>

"What I don't get," says Leah after she's popped the top on her third, "is how you could just leave like that. I never would have done that." Her eyes are fixed on a blonde who is fighting with a brunette in a gaudily-furnished McMansion.

"Lee…"

"I mean, your dad dies, you're traumatized, I get it. You took off and hung out with some cousin who wasn't me for a couple weeks. Whatever. I'm not judging you for how you grieve."

"I wasn't trying to abandon you," Jake starts to say.

"But you did," she says flatly. "Who cares if you didn't try to abandon me? You succeeded."

"Leah, I freaked out and ran away for a couple weeks. I had a lot of shit going on."

"You know I'm talking about the second time you did it," she says. "After you came back from wherever. You were here and we were starting to get it together, and then you disappeared again for nine months. No warning. God, Jake, where the hell were you?"

"Honestly?" says Jake, tipping the last of his second into his mouth and reaching for his third. "I was in Ireland."

"But...why?"

"It's...complex," says Jake. "You won't even believe me."

"Try me," she insists.

"Leah, can we please not fight about this right now? I can't do this now. Please."

Leah shuts up. She's good at shutting up. She's had a whole year to practice.

She is starting to doze off in Uncle Bill's recliner when Jake leaps to his feet, charges over to the front door, and throws it open. Leah doesn't recognize the man on the doorstep, but Jake crushes the stranger into a bear hug and drags him inside.

"Nahuel," he is saying, "You made it! How are you, man? God, I've missed the shit outta you."

Leah rubs sleep from her eyes and peers at the stranger groggily. He's not from the Rez. Doesn't look Makah, either, but definitely a native of some stripe. He's close to Leah's height, of a slight build, with long black hair braided down his back. His eyes are the same shade of medium-brown as his skin, and fringed with thick black lashes on top and bottom. He smells like the outdoors.

He is beautiful. And from the way Jake greeted him—that hug, that lingering grasp of the hand as he led Nahuel inside—Leah gets an unwelcome insight into just where Jake was for nine months and why he hasn't needed her the way she's needed him. Nahuel, whoever he is, is Jake's lighthouse at sea. After five seconds Leah can see that.

They might be lovers or they might not; Leah never had a sense that Jake was gay, but it seems there's a lot about him she doesn't know these days. Whatever Nahuel is to Jake, they're close. This asshole, this nobody, he stole her cousin and left her more alone than alone. Leah hates him immediately. It's a funny feeling, that hate: it's the warmest thing she's felt all year. She almost doesn't recognize the sensation.

"Nahuel and I met in Ireland," Jake is saying.

"So you're still sticking with the Ireland story?" she says, more nastily than she means to. Nahuel looks at Leah keenly, his beautiful black-lashed eyes kind and deeply understanding, and she suddenly wants nothing more than to punch him in the throat. She is appalled by the force of her reaction, blindsided by unfamiliar and unquenchable wrath.

"Leah," Jake says in shock, "I didn't…there's no story, I was really in Ireland."

"Doing what?" says Leah, staring pointedly at Nahuel, who drops his eyes.

"Taking care of some things."

"What things?"

"Leah, I can't really get into it—"

"Good night," mutters Leah, and goes to bed, clenching her jaw against all the things she has a sudden urge to scream. All of the emotions she hasn't felt in a year are crowding into her heart like passengers into the last lifeboat on the Titanic, and she completely fails either to comprehend her own rage or to sleep it away.

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><p><strong>If you want to know more about what's going on and don't mind some spoilers for my other two stories set in this universe, <em>Long Long Long <em>and_ Living in the Sun,_ here's what you need to know:**

**1. To avoid promoting Meyer's offensive Quileute history, I changed the wolf pack to a small group of nomadic shape-shifters ranging from hundreds to thousands of years old, who happened to be living with the Quileutes and helped broker the treaty with the Cullens in the Thirties. Jake is the great-grandson of one of those wolves; Leah, unbeknownst to her, is a descendant of another. Sam, Jared, Embry, _et al_ are not. For more on just how Meyer's version of wolfitude is racist and further details about what I changed, check out the A/N at the end of Chapter 8 of _Living in the Sun_.**

**2. James and Victoria murdered and drank several residents of La Push, including Emily and Claire Young, Sam Uley, Jared Cameron, and Billy Black. During this time, Jake encountered James. Proximity to the vampire forced the expression of Jake's latent werewolf gene. Soon he was welcomed into the aforementioned ancient nomadic wolf pack, who requested that the Cullens vacate the neighborhood temporarily for the safety of the local humans. Jake and his new wolf family followed the Cullens out of the country for several months, having only limited contact with his cousin Leah during this time, and telling her nothing of what had happened to him.**

**3. Jake imprinted on Nahuel. While my altered version of imprinting does not necessarily preclude romantic attachment, it also does not require it, and Jake and Nahuel are not dating. For more of my thoughts on imprinting and why I changed it, read the A/N to _Living in the Sun_ Chapter 14.**

**I hope that explains enough for this story to make sense even if you haven't been with me through _Long Long Long _and _Living in the Sun_. Enjoy!**


	2. Just A Little Blinding Rage

Leah has the opening shift at the store. She spends the morning and part of the afternoon sliding shoes on and off of strange feet. She tries not to make eye contact with anyone, and no one tries to make eye contact with her. She has a headache for every minute of her eight-hour shift. She takes a few sips of Starbucks coffee, hoping to kick this headache, and almost vomits it back up; then she spends the rest of the day feeling jittery. Coffee doesn't normally do that to her.

She drives herself home, hoping that Nahuel will be gone, feeling guilty for having judged him so quickly; and she is disappointed when he's still there, and guilty for feeling disappointed.

"Where's Jake?" she says, dumping her work duffel on the coffee table and kicking off her shoes. They're nice shoes; she bought them with her discount. They hurt her feet terribly.

Nahuel shrugs, putting down his book.

"Don't get up," says Leah, hurrying past him into the kitchen.

Her headache is measurably worse now than it was at work. She pops a few Ibuprofen, downs two glasses of water, and begins rummaging in the fridge before she even notices that Nahuel is standing in the doorway to the living room, looking at her.

"What?" she snaps.

Nahuel takes a step forward. "Are you well?" he says in a low, softly-accented voice, his head tilted slightly to one side, his slender brown hands clasped. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"I don't care what you do," says Leah. "Just stay out of my room."

Nahuel nods once, then leaves her alone.

Leah microwaves a tupperware full of rice and ground beef. She eats it quickly, surprised at her own appetite. She heats up Jake's dinner leftovers and eats those too. Her hunger is barely lessened.

Leah stands up from the table. Her head hurts. Her skin feels feverish and dry. A little walk outside will help. Leah is going to pass out if she doesn't get some goddamn air soon.

She puts on her coat and shoes and heads out back, to the woods behind Uncle Bill's house. Leah can smell the trees vividly, sharp and medicinal and oddly therapeutic. She can smell fresh earth and rock dust and animal droppings. It's the long twilit part of the day, a little past the afternoon, not actually evening yet. It's only four o'clock, but it feels later. Leah feels old.

She heads toward the stand of cedars. She feels detached from her own body. Her feet are steady and sure even though she doesn't much feel like she's actively controlling their movement. Her heart is thrumming too fast. Her coat is too warm; she sheds it and leaves it on the ground. The air is warmer than it was when she left work. Either that or _she's _warmer. Getting sick, probably. In which case being out here without a coat is a poor life choice. She should go back inside.

Instead, she lies down just inside the treeline, pillows her head on her arm, and falls asleep.

* * *

><p>Leah wakes up on the couch, covered in the afghan that usually lives draped over the back of Uncle Bill's recliner. She wakes up sweating, way too hot under this damn blanket. Her hair is sticking to her face and her mouth tastes bad.<p>

There is a sound of a page quietly being turned, and Leah creaks her head sideways to see Nahuel sitting comfortably in the recliner, reading his book. He looks up at her and smiles. She does not smile back.

"How'd I get here?" she croaks. "I was outside…"

"Yes, I saw," he says. "It was getting dark out, and cold. I brought you in. I don't think Jacob would want me to let you freeze to death out there."

"Next time, don't," says Leah brusquely. She claws her way free of the afghan, wads it up, and dumps it in Nahuel's lap. "This goes with that chair," she says, and goes up to bed.

* * *

><p>She calls off work for the next few days because her temperature is dangerously high. She seems to have contracted something nasty; no twenty-four hour bug, this. Probably picked it up from Jake's guest. Her ears have begun to buzz with phantom conversations, snatches of unfamiliar voices drifting through her brain. It's driving her crazy. She turns around a dozen times, sure that she's just heard her name called, but no one is looking for her, no one is calling for her, no one wants her. If this persists, she'll have to go to the doctor. She <em>hates<em> going to the doctor. It's all the way up in Seattle. There's one in Forks, too, but for some reason no one on the rez ever uses that one anymore. Leah was never very clear why.

She tries to head the illness off on her own, snuggling in her bed with tea and books and her laptop, leaving her bedroom only to make soup and use the loo. The hardest part about this is the boredom, because she isn't quite sick enough to sleep away her time. She ties an ice pack to the nape of her neck, and the meltwater drips down her back and drives her nuts.

One day Jake leaves the house for hours and hours, and with every hour that passes her hearing gets sharper, her eyes see more clearly, her nose twitches like a deer's. She hears the high electronic buzz of Jake's entertainment set-up, two rooms away. She even smells the dinners being made all up and down the street.

Leah has to get the hell out of this house. Being shut up with this flu is driving her mad, making her think she's hearing and smelling and seeing things. She drags her sweaty, feverish ass out of bed, downstairs and out into the woods behind the house. She feels funny. She no longer feels specifically _ill_. Now there is a distant, surreal quality to all of her perceptions, and she feels fidgety. Her body still feels too warm but she is no longer terribly uncomfortable. Her headache is gone, although there are still those buzzing ghost-voices to deal with.

Leah's hands are shaking.

She steps into the shade under the trees and feels patches of warmth and scent in the air, left behind by some passing living thing. She kicks off her flip-flops and walks barefoot between the trees, the hems of her sweatpants trailing in needles and dead leaves. The cool earth and rocks and roots and mulch soothe her sweaty feet. Leah raises her arms to let the breeze cool the sweat stains under her pits, lifts her hair off the back of her neck. She shouldn't fuck around with her health like this. She should take more care, woman up and see a doctor, get on some meds. If she dies, Jake'll have no one left but his sisters, who don't even live in-state. She should get back inside—

There is a footstep behind her and Leah twirls around reflexively. Nahuel is heading back toward the house, about fifty yards away. Too far away to have been what she just heard.

"What the fuck is this?" Leah mutters, and Nahuel pauses and turns his head toward her for a second. But he _can't _have heard her, not from all the way over there.

"Come here," whispers Leah, just to see if he'll react.

He does.

Nahuel jogs over to stand with Leah under the trees. Leah's brain is a balloon floating above her body. She's still feverish. She's hallucinating. This is just the flu. This must be the flu.

This has to be the flu.

Nahuel falls still beside Leah. "I was just going in—"

"Are you Jake's boyfriend?" interrupts Leah.

"No, I am not," he says, unruffled. "Jake is entirely heterosexual."

"And you?"

"I'm not attracted to Jake in the way you mean."

So they're not even boyfriend-boyfriend. They're just _friend_-friends. Why does that hurt? After all, it isn't as if she and Jake were best friends the way she and Emily were best friends. But they needed each other. She thought they needed each other. They understood each other's pain, at least, even if no one else did. And then he just went off and started needing someone else, and left her with nothing. The irrational anger that Leah felt the night she met Nahuel puts out shoots and reaches toward the sun. That anger bulges and swells in the span of a few heartbeats, so quickly it startles Leah, scares her with its bigness and implacability and mystery.

"Why are you here?" she snaps.

"Jacob asked me to visit," says Nahuel. The wind picks up and Leah arches her back against it, relieved to have something cool and damp blow away her angry fever. Her hair whips her in the face. The wind carries all sorts of smells, cedar, dead leaves, frost, fog, Nahuel—

Leah licks her lips. She can taste the air. She can hear needles crunching underfoot. She can hear insects near and far. Her eyes easily track a fly buzzing three yards away. This flu is giving her superpowers.

"I didn't know you would be here," he adds.

_Bet that wouldn't have stopped you_, thinks Leah viciously.

"Are you alright?" says Nahuel. "You look a bit—"

Leah hurls her body against his and wrestles him to the ground.

"What are you doing—!" He struggles to push her away.

_I don't know!_ thinks Leah's brain frantically, but it is still only a balloon hovering over her body, and her body wants to fight, her body wants to pummel something, her body needs relief from all this anger and hopelessness that has nowhere to go.

Leah watches her own hands ball up into fists and rain down blows upon Nahuel's chest and shoulders. She tries to punch his face, too, but he blocks her every time. He is small, not much taller than her, and very slender. But he is strong. She can tell. He blocks blows to his face but doesn't block ones to his chest or stomach. He is _letting_ her hit him, controlling where she is allowed to strike.

"You—don't—get—to—do that!" she screams in his face, and starts kneeing him. Her brain begins to panic; she could go to jail for this. This is assault. She is beating up her cousin's house guest just because she has anger management problems and, presumably, the flu. With a great force of will she stuffs her hands in her armpits, then backs away from Nahuel an inch at a time. It is a desperately difficult task: her feet don't want to move, and her arms twitch like they're going to start swinging again of their own accord. But she is mastering it—mastering herself, forcing an apology up into her throat—when he explodes out of that tight posture like a spring being released. He flings her away from him and she goes stumbling backwards, then slams into a tree. It knocks the wind out of her. Nahuel's pale brown eyes are blazing—with anger, surely? Is that what it is?

Whatever Nahuel is thinking, the resolve Leah so carefully manufactured got knocked out of her along with her breath, and the rational part of her mind is gone again. She charges at him, fists raised. She's not sure if it's because she actually wants to harm Nahuel or if it's because she wants him to harm her. Maybe she just wants to feel something, even something bad.

Nahuel suddenly slams the bony part of his shoulder into the divot of hers. Leah feels her left arm explode in searing pain, and is almost surprised when she looks down at it and sees no flames erupting from her shoulder socket.

With her good arm, Leah scrabbles for Nahuel's braid and yanks at it cruelly, but he twists out of her grasp and sweeps her knees out from under her. Leah lands on her tailbone—ow, ow, ow—and then kicks out and up with both feet. One heel makes contact with Nahuel's knee, and Leah feels the kneecap slide around. But Nahuel doesn't heed it. He aims a kick at her side, but she rolls out of the way and regains her feet. They circle each other for a few seconds, then Leah simply leaps across the space between them and boxes him over the side of the head. But she's come too close, too slowly: Nahuel takes this opportunity to wrap his arms around hers like a vice and hold her in place while she kicks and struggles and fumes, not strong enough to fight her way free.

"Why are you doing this?" he asks, his breath warm on her ear, and if he was pissed before he doesn't sound pissed now. More...confused? Pitying? That echo of pity washes over her like an ice bath. Leah slumps in his arms, all the fight draining out of her limbs. The moment this happens Nahuel releases her, and she drops heavily to the ground. She curls up on her side, digging her fingers into the dirt, letting her long hair hide her face.

"Leah?" he whispers, and she feels five warm fingers tentatively graze her shoulder blade. "Did this help?"

She has never been so ashamed. If only he would swear and hit her, and not sound so...so…

How can he possibly not be angry?

Leah can't bring herself to answer. After a few minutes she hears Nahuel's retreating footsteps, and she is alone again.

* * *

><p>Leah spends the remainder of the day outside; she is still there when Jake comes home, a little before sunset. Finally she gets thirsty and hungry enough to go back inside. She is sure that she'll be (rightly) told off for horrible terrible assholey behavior. She is sure Jake will light into her immediately, that she will get kicked out of the house and told never to return, which she absolutely fucking deserves.<p>

Instead, nothing of note happens. Jake has broiled some hot dogs, which he and Nahuel are snarfing down with great enthusiasm when Leah comes in. Jake greets his cousin without even raising his eyes from his overloaded plate, but Nahuel looks up at her. Without saying a word, he swipes his fingers across his cheek and raises his eyebrows. Leah mirrors his movement and realizes her face is filthy, crusted with dirt and other crap that stuck to the tear-tracks on her cheeks. She slides past Jake into the bathroom, and when she comes out she looks normal again, all evidence of the fight and her subsequent cry-in-the-woods washed away. Jake does not notice, and Nahuel never says a thing about it.

Later, Leah digs her engagement ring out of its resting place in the back of her underwear drawer. She turns it over and over in her fingers like a magic talisman. She wants Uncle Bill to make her laugh at herself until she forgets to feel ashamed. She wants Emily to convince her to sneak out back and smoke cigarettes in the woods and gossip. She wants Sam to brush her hair away from her face and kiss her slowly and make her feel like the most treasured woman alive. She wants, more than anything, to feel close to someone or something that knew her when she was happy. She slips the ring onto her finger, but it only slips off again.

* * *

><p>The shame from that afternoon clings to Leah's skin like wet-dog smell. She returns to work, because even though her body still feels weird and antsy and too-hot, she can't stick around at home forever. Besides, something about this sickness feels permanent. Might as well get used to it.<p>

She still doesn't go to the doctor.

Shame notwithstanding, Leah's urge to cause bodily harm to Nahuel was only temporarily satisfied, and soon returns to its full strength. When she is in the same room as him—even when she is in a room he has recently vacated—she feels jumpy and belligerent. It's not a feeling she understands. There is no aspect of Nahuel's personality which she actively dislikes; he's a fairly inoffensive guy, and he's obviously full of nothing but good feelings where Jake is concerned, which is a massive mark in his favor. He's constantly making Jake laugh, in _sotto voce _jokes and asides; and she can tell from some of the things he says that he's thoughtful and intelligent. What's more, Nahuel could have ratted her out to Jake, but didn't. He could milk her for all the guilt she's worth, but he doesn't. Never alludes to their tousle in even the most oblique way. He's _shielding_ her from the consequences of her own poor impulse control, and while she does not on principle condone this she can't help but be relieved when Jake doesn't find out.

If he were anyone else, she would have no problem with him at all. Shit, if he were anyone else she might even be trying to get him in bed, because the guy is so good-looking he almost gives off the impression of having a halo. She's seen him in sunlight and his skin practically _glows_. Gorgeous, kind, discreet: all are stellar reasons to like the kid, or at least to not dislike him. But she can't help herself. Something essential inside her rejects something in him, and she has no way of knowing what either _something_ is made of or how to defend herself against it.


	3. Unexpected Connections

One evening Jake, Leah and Nahuel watch one of the new Batman movies. Leah is trying real hard to be affable and sane; with Nahuel sitting a few short feet from her, the goal feels more unattainable with every passing minute. Even over the movie she can hear Nahuel and Jake whispering together like a couple of teenage girls, snickering at their own inside jokes. Half the time they're not even speaking in English, they're using Quileute, which is some bullshit because Nahuel is _not_ Quileute and he has _no right_—

Jake's phone buzzes and he slips outside to take the call. Leah grinds her teeth together and stares at (but does not really see) the movie. Christian Bale is talking like a bullfrog for some reason. The old white guy who was Scrooge in _The Muppet Christmas Carol_ is lecturing him about...something. Something something Nahuel sucks something something.

"Sorry, guys, I gotta run," Jake is saying over by the door. "Let me know how it ends."

"Is everything okay? Should I come with, or—?" Nahuel says.

"Bella's having a rough night," Jake mumbles. "I got it." Poor Jake. He must still have it bad for Bella, to run out of the house in a pair of shorts in the middle of winter, at the drop of a hat. He's not even wearing shoes.

Nahuel and Leah pretend to watch the movie for a few minutes more. Then Nahuel stands up, stretches, and goes outside. The screen door slams behind him. It sounds to Leah's ears like an insult, that door, and she grinds her teeth brutally for a minute or two and then follows him outside. She should recognize her own limits and stay away, but she's passed beyond that threshold. She's spent the last week struggling not to hate this guy. She might as well talk to him, find out if she's succeeded. She refuses to admit to herself that she's just aching for an excuse to start something, even though deep down she knows that's all this is.

He is lying on the porch swing, one arm crooked under his head, one leg dangling to the wooden floor to set the swing gently swaying.

"Something on your mind?" he says pleasantly.

"Bella's back in Forks?" says Leah.

"Not really," says Nahuel. "She and her family are in Montesano."

"Her dad's still in town, I saw him two days ago," contradicts Leah.

"I mean the Cullens."

"Oh."

Leah sits on a lawn-recliner that's occupied the same spot on this porch for as long as she can remember. It's the kind with the eternally-rusty aluminum frame and itchy, fraying, interwoven plastic ribbons forming the seat and back, a ubiquitous fixture of every picnic and barbecue since Leah was in pigtails.

"I guess you and Jake and the Cullens are all pretty tight, then?" she says.

"Somewhat," he allows. "Have you ever met any of them? I know they lived near here…"

"They weren't that close," Leah says. "They never came near the rez. And I never went to the hospital in town, so I never met the doctor. I'm pretty sure my dad and my uncle had something against him."

"Do you know why?"

"I don't know anything," she says bitterly. "No one tells me shit." She pauses, and looks at Nahuel, who is looking at her. "Why?" she says. "Do you know something?"

Nahuel shrugs. "Not much," he admits. "I know the Cullen family has a long history in this region. They helped settle it, I think."

"Um, asshole," says Leah acidly, "I'm pretty sure it was already settled."

"Yes," says Nahuel, "I believe that was the disagreement. It usually is."

"And why, pray tell, would you know all this tribal history if I don't?"

Nahuel peers at her, his eyes catching and reflecting the little light cast by the moon and stars. "It's the most persistent story in the world. I've seen it happen a thousand times; no one had to _tell_ me at all. But Jake did mention a few details when we met."

"Oh, of course," says Leah, "In _Ireland_. Yes. That magical place where dreams come true."

"I'm not sure I follow your tone. Why exactly are you so dead set against Ireland?"

"What I don't like is how Jake was depressed as fuck and then he just randomly moved to Ireland for nine months and came back happy as a lamb, totally over Uncle Bill's death, like nothing ever happened. He's _fine_ now. How is he fine? My parents are fine. Seth's fine. How the hell is everyone getting over this so fast? What's the hurry? Why am I the only one who's still not _fine?_" She's talking more than she meant to.

"Would you rather Jacob be unhappy?"

"Fuck you, you know that's not what I meant."

"Your cousin will never be over his father's death. How could he? He is simply living his life around it. He hides his sadness from you because he doesn't want to burden you. You're burdened enough as it is."

"How the fuck long is this going to take?" she says pathetically. "I can't even hide it. When do I get over it like everyone else did?"

"If you—"

"That was rhetorical. I'm not looking for advice from you." She rises to her feet. "You have _no idea_ what I'm going through. Keep your shitty opinions to yourself."

There is a pause. Then, pensively: "Does it help, hating me?"

"It doesn't hurt." Lies, all lies. _Everything_ hurts.

"Is it that you are now required to share Jacob with someone else?" he says. "Or is there something special about me that so absolutely enrages you? Don't think I haven't noticed."

"Notice all you want. You're just _very specially_ annoying, what can I say."

Nahuel is silent for a little bit. Then he says, quietly, carefully, "Well, I suppose it doesn't surprise me that you would feel this way. You're such a trainwreck to begin with."

Leah's heart just about stops and she breaks out in a sweat. "What did you just say, you little prick?"

"I said," Nahuel answers slowly and deliberately, "you're a self-righteous _caganita_. So you lost everything. So you're sad, your life is over. What do you want, _cuzão_, a trophy?" When Leah is too appalled to speak (or move, or breathe), he adds, "What, nothing to say?"

_He's trying to provoke you_, Leah's brain points out. And it's working like a charm. The anger—always simmering under the surface, always looking for a crack to vent through—bubbles up into Leah's throat and emerges as a hiss of rage. She would be well within her rights to pound his fucking ass into the dirt. No one would blame her; and isn't that why she followed him out here, really? _Don't do it_, her brain warns, _don't do it, just walk away..._

Nahuel glances at her out of the corner of his eye, then he looks back up at the ceiling with a bitchy little sigh, and her brain decides, _fuck it_. She reaches out and grabs the swing and dumps him off of it, onto the floor.

Nahuel hits the porch like a bundle of bricks, and while Leah is still debating whether to go ahead with this or walk away while she still can, he grabs her by the ankles and flips her onto the floor, knocking her breathless for an instant. She scrambles out of his reach but he catches her ankle again and drags her roughly back. She kicks out blindly and feels her bare heel make contact with Nahuel's jaw, and he curses and lets go of her. She flies at him, and they roll together under the swing and crash magnificently against the wooden porch banister. Inspired, Leah grabs a shard of railing that has splintered loose and slashes Nahuel in the chest with it. It leaves no mark in his skin, though it does shred his shirt impressively. The sound of ripping fabric feeds some sort of primordial fighting-frenzy in Leah's gut, and the urge to do something big and ugly and monstrous sets her reeling. Any remaining faculties of higher thought flee the inhospitable territory of Leah Clearwater's brain. Five minutes ago she was a cranky, sour-tempered girl with a poorly-understood axe to grind. Right now, her experience of reality is much simpler than that: Fighting Nahuel feels good, and she wants to win. Beyond that basic observation her sense of reason does not extend.

"Vai tomar no cu—" he hisses, but his words end in a scream of pain as Leah leans forward, out of her mind with this blind inexplicable urge to _dominate,_ and closes her teeth on his neck. She tastes blood, hot and metallic, and spits it out. Nahuel stares at her, his expression more fascinated than unhappy. He puts his hand to his neck and then looks at the smudge of red on his fingers. He looks back up at Leah, curiously. Not pissed off, which he should be. A little bit enthralled, a little bit bemused, a little bit beautiful.

Leah's sense of reason has completely given up on her by this time, so there is no force on earth that can prevent her from acting on an unholy impulse to fix her mouth on Nahuel's throat once more, not to bite but to suck, not blood but sweaty flesh. Nor does her sense of reason return in time to be displeased when Nahuel reaches out and digs his long fingers into the waistband of her jeans, and sharpens his nails on her hipbones, and crushes his lips and teeth and tongue against her throat. There is an exhilarating rush of wetness between her thighs.

Now her instinct to despise Nahuel collides cataclysmically with the splendor of his hands and tongue and low, pleased groans. Her dislike of him was never based in reason so it has not gone anywhere now that reason has fled; but her attraction to him is not apparently based in reason either, and can quite cheerfully share the brainspace.

Nahuel is sliding his hands under her tank top while she eagerly arches her back. In a moment her jeans are bunched at her feet and Nahuel is pressing his face against her belly button, kneading her ass with those long thin fingers, kissing and licking and sucking his way between the legs she enthusiastically spreads for him. Leah grips the broken edge of a handrail so hard it comes off in her hands, and in another few minutes she is coming off in Nahuel's hands, arms thrown across her mouth to smother her screams so the neighbors won't hear.

By the time Leah's vision clears up Nahuel is sitting back against the wood siding of the house, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Leah lies there, heart pounding, limbs heavy, and stares up at the sky beyond the eaves.

Nothing is said for several minutes. Leah's head feels clear for the first time in a very, very long time, not only uncontaminated by that baffling disdain for Jake's new best friend but also delivered of the obsessive year-long wretchedness that preceded it. She finds her mind going to unexpected places, making unexpected connections, turning up unexpected memories that have nothing to do with sadness or grief.

"When I was in fifth grade," Leah says, apropos of nothing, "I had this huge crush on a kid at school. Tim Whitehouse. I don't remember why I liked him, I just did. And one day we had this English test and that was my worst subject and I wasn't prepared for it at all and I wasn't used to failing, and I got so nervous I threw up all over the test and on the floor and everywhere. That was embarrassing enough on its own, but then Tim started laughing. Big stupid guffaws. And this awful feeling came over me, hot all the way through, completely humiliated, not because I'd thrown up and not because people were laughing and not even because _he_ was laughing, but because of how _ugly_ his laughs were. I'd never realized it before but he had just the ugliest, stupidest laugh, like a mean bulldog in a cartoon. It was this weird combination of feeling humiliated for myself and feeling almost, like, _embarrassed_ for him, with his ugly laugh. And I kind of...lost it." She peers over at Nahuel, who is watching her attentively, and continues.

"For about, maybe, five seconds, I just stood there covered in puke, and my feelings were way too big to process, too overwhelming for my dumb little eleven-year-old brain to comprehend. And then my hand kinda reached out on its own and hit him, right in the mouth, and all those feelings I had—the embarrassment, the shame, the anger—those feelings all went through my hand and into his face, and that was it. I didn't feel _better_, exactly, but I felt human again. I felt like I could understand my own mind again. Like for five seconds I was a little-girl-shaped volcano filled with anger and hurt, and then I hit him, and after that I was back to being an ordinary kid who was just having an ordinary bad day. I got sent home from school for fighting, but I never felt bad about it again. Just that small act of fighting back was enough to, I don't know, realign my brain, get me back into myself. Fuck, I'm not making sense..."

"You're making sense," says Nahuel. "Did it help, this time?" Leah dimly remembers that he asked the same thing once before.

"I guess it did," she says, sitting up. "I feel like me again. I'm sorry I bit you."

"Don't be sorry," says Nahuel. "I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but I don't mind if you bite me sometimes." He doesn't say it flirtatiously.

He says it like he means it.

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading and reviewing, guys!<strong>


	4. The Old Tense-and-Release

The following day is a low-traffic one for shoe-buyers in the greater Forks area. Leah is sent home an hour into her shift. She fixes herself half a dozen eggs and as many pieces of toast, then settles at the kitchen table with the book Nahuel's always reading. _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_, it's titled, and she doesn't understand a syllable of it. But the words look so beautiful on the page that she cannot help trying to pronounce them.

"Ow vermay que primero roe as frias carnes do mo cadaver…".

"_Ao verme que primeiro roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver dedico com saudosa lembrança estas Memórias Póstumas,"_ recites Nahuel's voice behind her. "Please, if you _must_ butcher my native language, at least try to do it without spewing your breakfast everywhere."

Leah squints at Nahuel, whose hair is tangled and wispy, whose only garment is a pair of ratty sweatpants, and she wads up the eggs-and-toast in her mouth and hawks it at his stomach. She is normally a very clean and tidy person, and can't imagine where this impulse came from, or why she didn't check herself in time. But Nahuel doesn't seem all that upset;. he merely sighs, scoops the bolus of eggs-and-toast off his stomach and back onto Leah's plate, smacks her gently upside the head with his book, and starts rummaging in the fridge for breakfast.

"So, which one are you from, Portugal or Brazil?" says Leah around a mouthful of food.

"Neither," says Nahuel. "Well, Brazil, sort of. But not really."

"Oh, of course, it all makes sense now," says Leah ironically. To her surprise, Nahuel laughs.

"My mother was from Chile, but she wasn't _really_ Chilean—she was Mapuche. My father is Portuguese."

"So you learned it from your dad, then?"

Nahuel grimaces and sits across from her with a plate of bread, sliced ham, and cheese. "Thankfully, no. My aunt kept him far away from me for the first few years. But she barely interacted with me. I spent most of my time alone. I barely ever heard Tia Huilen say one word. I learned to speak very late. Some Jesuits taught me. They taught me how to read, too, although for a long time I didn't know there were books other than the Bible. I do know some Mapudungun, because once my aunt realized I was learning Portuguese against all her best efforts, she wanted to balance out my education. But I don't use it very much. Hardly anyone to use it _with_. I have some friends in Santiago who speak it, some relatives on my mother's side. But Portuguese and Spanish are both easier for me, and Portuguese came first. Just not from my father."

"I gather you aren't close with your dad?"

"Not really."

"And your aunt?"

"Not really." He reaches up to fiddle with the end of his braid, then starts to unravel it. His hair is long—almost as long as Leah's, but with a different texture. Hers is very silky and very straight, shiny as a raven's wing. His is wavier and more textured, more prone to tangling. He uses his fingers to comb through it a few times and then re-braids it. Finally, he says, "My aunt is okay. She cares about me, as much as she can. We're just not close."

"Mm," says Leah around a mouthful of egg. "I get that. I never, ever question how much my mom and dad love me, and I would be real messed up if something happened to them, but once you get past the big deep stuff, all the day-to-day interactions are mostly us bickering. Seth is the one who really kept us close, and he moved away, so now..."

"Seth?"

"My brother. He's the golden child. He's so easy to get along with. Up until I moved in here, my mom and I were always at each other's throats. And my dad takes my side when it's just the two of us, but he would never go up against my mom. Em was the only one who could ever sweeten her up—besides Seth, I mean."

"Who's Em?"

Leah pauses. The name slipped off her lips; she didn't mean to bring her up. She never talks about her.

"Emily Young," she says quietly. "My cousin. Um. The one who was…" She trails off

"I'm sorry."

"Emily was my best friend," says Leah. "I really miss her. She used to—"

Leah breaks off; Jake's key is sounding in the lock, and she suddenly feels like she's said too much, even though she hardly said anything at all. Nahuel gets up, stands behind Leah's chair, and drapes one arm loosely around the front of her shoulders. He holds her briefly against his warm bare belly before continuing on to the living room. While Nahuel is greeting Jake, Leah slips out the back door. She spends the rest of the day driving aimlessly up the coast, remembering.

* * *

><p>The voices in her head come and go, and they seem to be at least somewhat linked to Jake's actions. Usually he tells her where he's going and when he's coming back, but sometimes he just vanishes, for an hour or ten, sometimes with Nahuel, sometimes alone. That's when the voices get loudest and Leah grows feverish and truculent. When that happens, she is able to read the warning signs and keep herself from doing anything crazyinappropriate/violent, but only by assiduously avoiding Nahuel's company—because the other rule about her fevers, besides their mysterious link to Jake, is that all of the aggression and ire that accompany them stick to Nahuel and no one else. She doesn't become indiscriminately angry, when the phantom-voices start up and her temperature soars. She becomes _specifically _angry, wants specifically to fight, specifically against _him_. He's been so cool about all of her bullshit that she _really _can't justify attacking him now (not that she could before), so she curtails these feelings by running out into the woods or jogging ten miles down the road or locking herself in her room and throwing darts at her wall.

She gets very good at darts. Bullseye, every time.

* * *

><p>One Friday at work, a cute guy comes into the store, a guy she vaguely knows from her aborted semester in college. She only realizes it's him after he's been trying to catch her eye for five minutes, and then she plasters a smile on her face and tries to remember his name.<p>

They chat about school and their respective jobs and then he asks her when she gets off work and if she'd like to go for a drink. She thinks about it carefully—this is the first time she's been asked out in several years, and she honestly hasn't given much thought to her romantic life since Sam died. But eventually she hands him her phone so he can put in his number. He taps out his name (Dylan, evidently) and his digits and they arrange to meet at a divey bar in town for more mindless chatting.

Leah's a little surprised a human guy found her attractive enough to ask out at all, but on her break she looks at herself in the mirror and discovers, with no small amount of surprise, that she's pretty again. She used to be pretty. Then everyone died and she lost too much weight and her hair started thinning and her skin broke out and went all sallow and ashy. But now—probably because of her recent surge in appetite—she's got some of her shape back and her skin and hair look really good. She makes faces at the mirror for a few minutes and then, in a fit of vanity, digs an ancient tube of lipstick out of her purse and swipes it on.

After work, Leah drives home, showers, puts some stuff in her hair to make it fluff out for once, and slaps a little makeup on her face. She even manages to dig out a pair of jeans that fit her ass well and don't have stains on them, although she has to wear a tank top because she's feeling warm again and she'll sweat through anything else. Jake being out plus pit stains are one of the warning signs of impending belligerence, but she is reluctant to call off the date. She actually wants to go out, maybe have a few laughs and feel normal. At least, she wants to see if she _can_.

Leah drives out to the bar and waits at the counter for fifteen minutes before Dylan shows up. He apologizes for his lateness, she says honestly that she doesn't care, and they have a few drinks. Dylan is cute. He's moderately funny, although his smugly self-abasing white liberal maleness wears thin sort of quickly. He dresses well and he's tall. Leah doesn't remember most of what he says that night, but not because she drinks too much and not because she isn't listening: not altogether to her surprise, the voices are back again. Leah sips her gin and tonic and wonders if she's got the same thing that Bella Swan survived—a tumor, wasn't it? Located in the part of her brain that feels pain, which led to a lot of phantom agony. Maybe Leah's got a tumor in the part of her brain that hears voices and regulates aggression. In which case, Leah feels powerfully envious of Bella's imaginary pain, and considers it a ripoff that all she gets is stupid voices and bitchiness. If she's dying, she wants to goddamn feel it happening.

Dylan kisses her partway through the evening, and she kisses him back. His skin feels soft, his lips feel soft, his hair is short and well-kept and it smells like product. His lips taste like beer. Leah opens her mouth to him, and he very cautiously slips his tongue into her mouth. His tongue tastes like beer. There is a feeling of familiarity, even normalcy, that settles onto Leah as she and Dylan make out. It's the feeling Sam gave her, especially after they got engaged. Kisses of comfort and safety, just warm enough to be interesting.

She pulls away.

"Are you okay?" says Dylan, looking handsomely into her eyes.

Leah smiles weakly. She needs a change of scenery, and some fresh air. "Do you want to get out of here?" she says. Dylan nods, trying not to look too excited. Leah isn't sure what she's feeling right now. She isn't sure if she wants to hook up with this guy, with his soft lips and his comfortableness and his gentle good-guy demeanor. She isn't sure if she can even shut up the voices long enough _to_ hook up. They're loud tonight.

_—it's with the—well, follow them!—the procedure should take—learning to read—you can't even_—

"Are you sure you're all right, Leah?" says Dylan. "I should take you home. You look tired."

"I'm okay," she says. "I'm just thinking."

"About what?"

They leave the bar and walk arm-in-arm to the parking lot. The cool, fresh air which brushes against Leah's warm flesh is both more pleasant and more sensual than anything Dylan's been doing.

"Leah?" Dylan prods. "What're you thinking about?"

"I just...I used to be engaged. I don't think I told you that," she says. Dylan puts his jacket around her shoulders, which probably makes sense to him since it's mid-January and she's out here in a tank top and jeans. The jacket makes her feel stifled, but she doesn't take it off.

"You didn't," he says cautiously. "How...what happened?"

Leah looks up at the stars. They're brighter on the rez. She should be at home, with Jake. And Sam. And Emily. And Uncle Bill.

"Do you, um...do you remember the La Push killings? It happened over a year ago but it was pretty big news at the time."

"Yeah," says Dylan, "that was just before you left school. Bio 101 was never the same after you dropped it." He starts to smile, but catches sight of the look on her face and his smile freezes.

"I was engaged to Sam Uley. Emily Young was my best friend, and my cousin. Billy Black was my uncle. I knew most of the victims. I was _close_ with most of the victims."

"You were engaged to _that_ Sam?"

Leahs nods and feels her eyes grow hot, and knows she's about to cry. She really _really_ doesn't want to cry. She wants to fight something. She needs to fight something. What would Dylan do if she started punching him right now? Would he punch her back? Would he make her feel powerful and vibrant and alive?

But the urge to fight can't seem to attach itself to Dylan. Besides, Leah is not yet insane enough to think that what she and Nahuel did is normal behavior for everyday folks. She's going to have to find a way to process her emotions like a regular human being, assuming that's even possible.

"Oh my god, Leah, I'm so sorry," Dylan gushes, and pulls her into his arms. Leah doesn't punch him; she just sobs onto his shoulder, sweltering in his jacket, not feeling better at all, feeling worse with every breath. Crying may be cathartic in books and movies, but it's never been cathartic to her.

"Sh, ssh," murmurs Dylan, stroking her hair. "Listen, I only live about a mile away. You want to come over? I can make you some coffee and we can just talk. So you don't have to be alone."

Well, anything's better than standing around wailing in the parking lot of some lame bar. And if crying won't help, maybe getting some action will. Leah sniffles her affirmative and lets Dylan open the car door for her. She sheds his coat as soon as his back is turned, which doesn't make much difference to her blistering-warm face and chest.

Dylan holds her hand while driving them to his house, explaining that his roommates are out of town until classes start back up in a few days and that she can cry some more if she wants. Leah thinks meanly that he's probably got the biggest liberal guilt-boner right now because he gets to comfort a bereaved Native American with a juicy backstory. It's not a pleasant thought, but it does keep her from crying.

Dylan makes her coffee, and then they make out on his couch while Moby plays in the background. They are getting fairly hot-and-heavy, Leah is straddling Dylan's lap and even moderately enjoying being felt up by him, when Dylan pulls back.

"What's wrong?" she says.

"Nothing," says Dylan. They make out some more, and he pulls back again.

"You're so...strong," he says. This surprises Leah, who doesn't think of herself as being strong at all.

"Not me," she says. "I'm always collapsing into an insane puddle of emotions. If anyone's strong, it's my cousin, he can get over things in a way I never could…"

"No," says Dylan quickly, "I mean physically. Um, I think I'm bruising."

Leah looks down at his wrists and realizes he's right, there are already little pink bruises forming where she was holding on to him. He has them on his neck, too, and one at the corner of his mouth.

"God, Dylan, I'm sorry," she gasps, leaping to her feet. Even as she speaks, the bruises darken. Oh god. Oh god. Voices and fever were one thing, but now...what is _happening_ to her?

"It's okay," he says, getting up. "I know you're feeling a lot of things right now...we don't have to do anything you don't want to."

"I should go," and she grabs her purse. "I'm sorry about the bruises. I'm really sorry. I didn't even notice."

"Hey, it's okay—Leah!" She turns at the door and looks at him wearily. "Maybe we can try this again, when...another time."

"This was never going to work," she says dully, and leaves. He looks more hurt by her rejection than by the physical pain she inflicted on him, but she can't quite drum up an emotional response to that. She's too busy worrying about this bruisey new development.

Leah jogs all the way back to her car, still parked in the parking lot of the bar. She doesn't even feel that mile pass under her feet. She's sweating and feverish again. The voices are pounding away between her temples again.

_—Nessie likes—her Laelia for once—aw, don't be—well Nahuel's back at the—_

Leah slams into her car because she isn't paying attention to her surroundings. That was Jake's voice, very clearly, very audibly. It was Jake's voice, and it was talking about Nahuel. Goddamn Nahuel, always in the middle of whatever insane tornado of fuck-upery drops into Leah's life. None of this started until he showed up. The fevers, the voices, hell, even the appetite—

And now she's bruising guys twice her size, without even trying. Is _that_ Nahuel's fault, too?

She speeds home, races up the stairs and bursts into the tiny guest room where Nahuel has been staying. He is sitting up in bed, on top of the covers, in his underwear, reading. He looks up at Leah without comment. He's just a guy reading in bed in his underwear. That's not weird. Nothing about that is weird.

What _is_ weird is that all the lights in the house are off, including this one, and Leah didn't bump into a single thing or trip on a single tread on her dash up the stairs, and Nahuel is reading in the dark, and the fact that she just busted the lock on his door _with her bare hands_ isn't even remotely unnerving him. Fevers, voices, appetites both gluttonous and lewd, now unnatural strength and night-vision?

"What _are_ you?" she demands, her arms shaking, her voice shaking, her sanity shaking. "What _the hell are you?_" Her voice rises in pitch and volume. She was not seriously worried until now; whatever was happening before was happening to a Leah still partially-embalmed by depression. Now she's feeling basically human again, _wanting_ things again, and this has presented her with a renewed need to worry about things. And this—all of it—is worrying. What is happening to Leah right now is not a tantrum so much as a panic.

Nahuel stands up, puts a playing card in his book to mark his page, and takes a step toward Leah, who takes a step back. Nahuel stops advancing. "I'm nothing," he says. "I'm nobody."

"Don't _give me_ that," insists Leah. "You are _not_ nothing. You just...you came into this house and fucked everything up, and you stole my favorite cousin, and now you're reading in the dark like a psychopath, and I _want_ to _know_ who you _are!_"

"I'm no one," he says again, doggedly.

"Don't fucking lie to me, you asshole!" she shouts. "I just went on the first date I've been on in a year, and just as I was about to _finally have sex with a man_, he had to call it off because I was leaving _bruises_ on him for a half hour without even noticing! I was hurting him!"

"So?" says Nahuel unconcernedly. "That sounds exactly like you."

"No," she says, "it fucking doesn't, because you know what, _I'm not strong_. I don't leave bruises on people, and I _especially_ don't do it by accident. Look at me!" She spreads her arms, which are neither bulky nor toned. "I don't hurt people!"

"You bit me!" Nahuel reminds her, advancing another step, and this time Leah doesn't back up.

"Yeah, like, _once_. You said it didn't bother you!"

"It didn't," he says. "I mean, it doesn't."

"Yeah, and you know what, Nahuel, that's fucking _weird_. That would bother a normal person. What is _wrong_ with you? _What is wrong with me?_"

"Do you really want me to answer that, or…?"

"Shut up. Whatever is happening to me didn't start until you got here," she says. "You did this. I don't know how, but you fucking did this to me. Admit it."

"What am I supposed to be admitting, exactly?"

"Admit you got me sick! Admit you're screwing with me! Admit you know what's happening to me, and then maybe fill me in on _what's happening to me!_"

"I have no idea what's happening to you," he says. "Maybe you're going cra—"

But he doesn't get to finish, because she launches herself at him like an osprey on a drowned rat, and he barely manages to beat her away.

"I'm _not_ strong," she asserts. "I don't work out. I've never been strong. This is _new._"

"You think you're not strong?" cuts in Nahuel. "Are you insane?"

"Don't call me insane."

"Fine," he says, "then you're a blind idiot."

"_Say it again!_" she screams.

"Ora, vá à merda!" he screams back.

And they're fighting again. Nahuel is one slippery fucker and she can't hold him. He gets both her wrists in one hand and holds her off him with the other, but her legs are still free. She kicks him right in the solar plexus, so he goes staggering against a bookshelf. Splinters of wood fly everywhere and books tumble to the floor. Nahuel recovers quickly, hurtles toward her and knocks her to the floor; her breath leaves her body for a second. He's got a handful of her hair in one hand, he's pulling it sharply up, so hard that if she doesn't want it to come out of her head she has to straighten her neck as far as it will go. But he's got both her wrists in his hand again, his knee on her chest, and she can't move except to squirm.

"Still want to fight?" he says, pulling her hair a little more so she has to lengthen her neck a bit further.

Leah spits in his eye.

Nahuel reflexively wipes his face before he realizes he probably shouldn't have let go of her. She scrambles to her feet and drops on top of him like a bag of rocks, pinning his body and hands like he just pinned her. He gazes up at her, his eyes wide as saucers, his hair in frayed disarray around his face, his lips parted and panting and perfect, and it happens again, it _goddamn happens again_.

Leah finds herself kissing this beautiful absurd boy right on the mouth, and before she knows it she's left his hands free to rake up her sides, underneath her shirt, across her back like the claws of a devil.

"Você é perigoso," he mumbles against her lips before digging his fingers down the back of her pants to clutch at her ass. Leah wriggles her groin against his.

Then he flips her off of him and over, so she's face-down on the floor, and yanks her pants off so swiftly they leave a denim burn all down her legs. He plants his face between her buttcheeks, and she's lifting it up against his mouth, spreading her legs, reaching down between her body and the floor to finger herself while he turns her ass into a buffet line. She hears him stroking himself in time to her writhing, and the visceral, slippery sound of it is so hot that it makes her—it's making her—_she's gonna_—

Leah is just barely beginning to come when Nahuel slides two fingers smoothly inside her, curving them forward, and her come turns into a waterfall of comes, a rainbow of comes, a stampeding unicorn frenzy of comes that take a hundred years to run out.

Then she's trembling hard on the wooden floor, dizzy and lightheaded. Nahuel is flopped back against the side of his bed, underwear around his knees, looking at her in the light from the window. She sits up so fast she almost falls over again from the head rush. Her ass squelches in a damp spot on the floor which might be his and might be hers. Nahuel blinks hazily at her.

"I guess I should probably apologize," says Leah. "Again."

"For what?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure I just accused you of being some sort of secret supervillain. Shit, man, I know I'm fucked up right now. Doesn't mean it's your fault."

Nahuel looks away, won't meet her eyes. "What if it really was my fault?" he says quietly.

"God, Nahuel, I was talking out of my ass. I'm just having a rough time right now, you know, transitioning back into...life, I guess. I know it's not your fault."

"But what if it was?" he presses.

"I don't see how it can be." Leah is not entirely sure what he's driving at.

"Just now, a few minutes ago," he says, "you were absolutely sure that I was doing this to you. You must have had a reason for believing that."

Ah. Should she tell him about the voices? Leah does not automatically reject that notion, even though she hasn't yet trusted _anybody _with that information. She's not worried about Nahuel thinking she's insane, any more than he already does. On the other hand, the voices have been mentioning _him_, and she's not prepared to address that particular issue right now. So she just tries to downplay the whole thing.

"I was freaking out because I kept bruising Dylan."

"Dylan is…?"

"The guy I was on a date with," she clarifies.

"Mm. Poor Dylan," he says, drily and yet so suggestively that Leah laughs.

"Poor Dylan," she agrees. "I didn't even know I was doing it. My whole body's been changing so much lately. I'm eating differently. And now I'm getting strong. I don't know why that is. It's probably some hormonal thing. Maybe my body is just finally catching up from the entire last year. After Sam and Em died, and everything got terrible, I hardly ever ate, and I slept all the time, but my sleep didn't mean anything to me. It didn't feel good, it was just better than being awake. And now I actually sort of want to be awake, and I guess that means I have to get used to using my body again. I don't know if it's just a coincidence that all of this is happening when you're here, but...it's very stressful, sometimes. And when I get stressed out, I start blaming people, and you're easy to blame, because you're here, and you're new, and you have Jake."

"That all sounds very reasonable," he says, but suspiciously, like he doesn't really believe it _is_ reasonable.

"That's one way of putting it. Another way would be 'batshit crazy', as I believe you tried to say before I attacked you for no good reason."

"I don't think you're crazy. I was just trying to provoke you. You seemed like you wanted to be provoked."

Leal laughs good-naturedly. "You weren't wrong," she says. "Nahuel, be honest: am I crossing a line you don't want crossed? Believe me, I appreciate the hell out of all you've done for me. Not telling Jake, and letting me just vent whenever I want. But I don't believe for one minute that it's normal. And if you want me to stop, I'll...I'll stop." She realizes with a pang how very much she does _not_ want Nahuel to say, _stop, I'm done, it's over_. What would she do then? How would she even get by?

"Que Deus me perdoe, I don't want to stop either," he says, with a small laugh that is bitter and warm at once. "I will say one thing, though: if you ever try to humiliate me, I'm done. That's the only rule I care about. Other than that..." There is a long pause before he says hesitantly, "I think there's something you need that you can't find anywhere else. It's the same thing I need, too, even if I didn't know it before. And maybe… I like that there's something two people need, that they can only give each other."

"I know what I get out of this," she says, "but why do _you_ do it? I thought you were just being...cooperative."

"I have one very big problem," he says, "and I don't know how to find the solution to it. I just obsess over it, day in and day out, and I never get anywhere. I can never think of an answer. I guess it takes someone like you to clear my head. I'm going to sleep like a kitten tonight, I can tell."

"What's the problem?" says Leah. "Maybe I can help."

"Didn't you hear me?" he says, smiling, reaching out with amazingly prehensile toes to grab her foot. "This is you, helping." But he won't say any more about it.

What is it that chases Nahuel around like Sam and Emily chase her? She doesn't want to pry, so she lets it go. For now, Leah is simply relieved that she no longer has to feel guilty over this...this _thing_ they're doing. What is it, really? Are they enemies? Friends with benefits? Sparring partners? Puppies play-fighting in preparation for the real world? Leah feels smooth and sleepy and relaxed at the moment, but she knows that in a few hours or a day she's going to go back to wanting to punch Nahuel, and it's not going to feel so friendly. But he knows that about her, and he doesn't mind, he's willing to play along provided she follows some basic rules. _Thou shalt not humiliate_.

There are worse things to base a friendship on.

* * *

><p>The next morning, when Leah drags her ass out of bed, she hears voices again, but not imaginary ones this time. Through the wall she can hear Jake and Nahuel, talking quietly to each other.<p>

"—Pretty sure there's another one around, we keep getting hints of someone else on the line," Jake is saying.

"Any idea who?"

"God, who knows? Jae fucked like, every female in the tribe over a span of about eighty years. Asshole permanently re-wrote the genome of the Pacific Northwest. It could seriously be anyone. Might not even be someone in the tribe. He fucked settlers' wives, too."

Leah gets dressed and brushes her hair and heads down the hall. She passes by Nahuel's open door to see him and Jake sitting in the middle of the floor, gluing pieces of bookshelf back together and laughing comfortably together, like brothers.

"What happened?" she says.

Nahuel looks at her, eyes glowing like varnished teak in the light from the early sun, and says, "Nothing. I tripped."

* * *

><p><strong>Long one today. Thank you for your reviews, sorry I haven't been responding to them in PM, but this has been a crazy work-week and is only getting crazier. So just know I value you!<strong>


	5. Two Problems With One Solution

Leah works again that afternoon and gets three texts from Dylan, who _feels terrible about last night_ and _wants to make it up somehow_. Leah guesses that if she were white and middle class, he would designate the date the failure that it was and move on, but that dating a native is worth too many sensitive-white-guy points to pass up. For real, he texts her to make sure she understands that he _really wants to hear more about her culture_. Chump.

She ignores the texts but realizes that one bad date has not scared her off permanently, which may be an indication that she is ready to start living again. So she enrolls last minute in a couple of classes at Peninsula College. She's got enough saved to buy part-time tuition toward her major. She can finish her degree in stages, over a period of years if she has to. Even if it takes her forever, she's goddamn going to be alive again.

* * *

><p>Soon Nahuel leaves town for a few weeks, and Leah finds her equanimity returning. After a few days in his absence, her temperature descends to a steady 98.4, and she hears only the voices one would expect to hear in one's brain, like her inner monologue or her mother whispering that she really ought to put a sweater on. She experiences fits of melancholy only when she is tired or specifically reminded of Em and Sam and Uncle Bill. She barely ever gets angry at all.<p>

Empowered by her new sense of mental well-being, Leah goes on a few dates with Mark, a guy from school. They get along well and never run out of things to talk about, and after four dates, they spend an awkward-but-sweet night in his bed. She never hurts him, even by accident, and they never fight, and it's all very comfortable and easy. Leah is almost frightened of how easy it is.

In early March, Jake leaves her alone in the house for a few days, so Leah decides to all-out romance her boyfriend. She cooks him dinner, which turns out pretty well, and they drink red wine and listen to sexy music and then they sit on the couch in mood-lighting and make out. Its good, really. Leah feels good. She feels excited and adventurous.

"You're so warm," says Mark, kissing her neck. Leah blows a wisp of her hair away from her eyes. She _is_ warm.

"I'll just open up a window," and she does. The evening is very clear, the night-bugs are loud, and the air smells heavenly. Leah leans her elbows on the sill and sips the cool air for a little while.

Mark comes up behind her and puts his hands on her hips. Leah's pulse quickens. Wonderful. What a wonderful night, full of marvelous sensations. She can hear Mark's heart beating.

_no, there it—yeah I'm getting—again, and—me too—wow, it's really—_

The voices, one of them Jake's. They were gone and now they're back. And if the voices are back…

Leah walks to the bottom of the stairs. "Hello?" she calls, heart pounding with combined dread and anticipation.

A door creaks open and light steps sound in the upstairs hall.

"Hey," Nahuel calls down. His voice sounds odd.

"How long have you been here?" Leah asks.

"I got in this afternoon."

"What have you been doing up there?"

There is a pause, after which Nahuel responds: "Thinking." His voice is tight and hard.

"Um, Leah," says Mark, "everything okay, or…?" Leah looks over at him, standing uncertainly by the window, and is surprised by the revelation that there is no possibility of him holding her attention tonight. Nahuel is thinking, which means obsessing, which means he has a problem, the same problem as before or a different one. He needs a friend more than Mark needs to get laid. All of this passes through Leah's mind in one short, sure instant.

"Mark," she says apologetically, and at the tone of her voice his face falls. "I'm so sorry to do this, but can we...can we finish this another time? I think something's up."

"Are you sure?" he asks, coming close and looking into her eyes.

"I'll call you tomorrow," says Leah firmly. "I'm sorry."

Mark's shoulders slump; he kisses Leah once, and then leaves. Leah waits for his car to leave the driveway before bounding up the stairs, two at a time.

Nahuel is sitting on his bed. "That was cold," he says tonelessly.

Leah just shuts the door quietly and sits on the bed next to Nahuel. "What the hell happened to you?" she says seriously. "You look like crap." His eyes are bloodshot, his mouth is set too tightly, and his hands, clenching on his thighs, are so tense the veins stand out.

"As usual, thank you for your kindness."

"Nahuel, I mean it," she says. Her temperature is still rising, she can practically feel it every time it goes up another degree, but it's not an angry heat. Not this time.

"Yes," he says, "I am aware I look like crap."

"Tell me what's wrong. I want to help."

"Don't try to be nice to me" he says, "it's very unsettling."

"I'm not being nice to you. I just want to know why you ruined my date."

"_I_ ruined your—!" For a second she sees life in his eyes, but it dies down quickly. "My sister told me my father is gone for a while. She says she wants to help me. She hates what he does, and she is looking for a way out, but she has never had anyone to protect her, or help her make plans. So I agreed that I would try to help her, I went up to see her, and that is when I found out that my father has done something terrible. I don't know how to help my sister and also prevent him finishing what he's started. I don't even know if it's possible. He is so strong, so determined. And my sister is not used to standing against him. She has never tried it before."

"What's the thing he did?" asks Leah.

"Why on earth would I tell you that?"

"Maybe I can help," she suggests.

"Yeah, I don't think so," says Nahuel. He stands and begins unpacking the clothes from his duffel bag into drawers that still bear belongings from his previous stay here. When he comes back to sit beside Leah again, his fingers straighten and curl restlessly. Leah scooches back so she is leaning against the wall and indicates that he should do the same. They sit quietly for a few minutes.

"Is it a drug thing?" she says at last.

"Not exactly," he says, sighing heavily. "It's a woman thing."

Leah settles into the quilt and looks at him expectantly.

"Joham goes through these...cycles. He finds a woman he likes. He romances her, seduces her. Pulls her in, gets her to depend on him for everything. Convinces her to live where he wants her to live, eat what he wants her to eat, see who he wants her to see. When he has isolated her completely, he loses interest, and he abandons her, but only after she has nothing left."

"That's terrible." Leah links fingers with Nahuel.

"That is not the worst of it. Four times, now, these relationships have resulted in children. My three sisters, and me. Joham left my mother while she was pregnant, but she was not alone. My aunt was devoted to her, and took care of her, and helped her with the delivery. But my mother did not survive. That is why Huilen finds me difficult to love, but I am a part of my mother, and so she will always protect me if she can. She stood between Joham and me, when he came to collect me. I was only a small child. But my sisters—they had no Tia Huilen. My father did not want the mothers, not after he had already decided to abandon them; but he wanted the children. He wants to own us. And with my sisters, he has succeeded." His fingers, still held loosely in Leah's, curl into a fist.

Leah is too shocked to say a word, but she squeezes his fingers briefly, puts her arm around his shoulders, and holds him.

"I went to visit my sister Jen, and while I was there Joham showed up. There was a...confrontation. Never a good idea, where that bastard is concerned. At least he didn't break anything this time. Last time I disagreed with him, he beat the shit out of me. It took me weeks to heal. Broke both my legs, punctured a lung and an eardrum, dislocated both arms and then left me in the woods to die."

"He did all that and it only took you _weeks_ to heal?" says Leah, confused.

"Months, years, whatever," he says unhelpfully. "The point is, it doesn't do any good confronting him."

"Nahuel, how old were you when this happened?" asks Leah. She's picturing him as a little boy, cowering in the indistinct shadow of a menacing adult. The image makes her want to hunt down Joham and teach him a few choice things about hitting children.

"I don't know," says Nahuel, "maybe twenty?" So at least he wasn't a minor, not that that excuses his dickweed father.

"So you visited Jen, and your father showed up. And that's why you're upset?"

"That's part of it," he says, his voice growing quieter with each word. "My sister told me he has a woman living in a house in the middle of nowhere. She thinks the woman may already be pregnant. Of course he'll get custody. He gets everything he wants."

"Except you," Leah points out.

"Except me," he agrees. "He would kill to get me too, if he thought it would work. His only son. Now it will all happen again. I don't know how to stop it. How do I stop such a man? It seems impossible, but I cannot let this continue. I cannot let this woman give birth to his child, only to have it taken from her. I cannot let him turn another innocent baby into someone like Serena. She is the oldest, his most faithful little soldier. She is dangerous. But the other two belong to him in their own ways. It is difficult to know who to trust."

"You can trust me," says Leah staunchly. "I'll thump his ass pro bono if I ever get the chance."

Nahuel barks out a short, bitter laugh. "He's out of your league," he says, shaking his head. "He's out of _my_ league. I would never let him near you."

"He must be getting up in years," Leah remarks. "I can take an old guy."

"You'd be surprised."

"Well, if you get desperate," she says, determined to make him understand this one thing. "If you run out of options. I'll help you if I can. I owe you."

"You don't owe me anything."

"Nahuel, I was a barely-animate corpse for a _year_. I absolutely fucking owe you. You don't have to take me up on it. But I'm still going to offer."

"I'll keep that in mind," he says, relenting. "I think I should try to sleep."

"I agree," says Leah, getting up and turning the covers down. Nahuel lets her tuck him in like a little boy, and she plays with his hair until he falls asleep. Leah stands up, stretches, goes over to the door. She looks back at him once before turning out the light. Almost everyone looks younger asleep, but Nahuel looks older. Old enough to have lost his faith in humanity, several times over, differently each time. His smooth, dark skin looks carved from some ancient rock. He's a mummy, a fossil, a monument.

Leah turns the light off and silently latches the door. Her head and her heart ache terribly, and deep down she fears that Nahuel is right: he has moved far beyond her ability to help.

* * *

><p>Leah wakes up at an unseemly hour. Her fever is worse and there is no chance of sleeping any more tonight. So she pads downstairs in the dark and downs glass after glass of water. She opens all the windows to let the cold air in, splashes cold water on her face and neck, and waits for her temperature to go down.<p>

Of course it doesn't. Then _he_ comes downstairs to get water. His sweatpants hang low around his narrow hips, threatening with every step to fall down but never quite managing it.

"Can't sleep?" he says, no louder than a whisper, but she hears him perfectly.

"No," she says, turning to face him instead of the window. "I see you couldn't either."

"Actually," he says, "I'm done sleeping. This is when I get up."

"You're kidding."

"I don't sleep much."

"Well, what do you do with all that extra time?"

"Different things," says Nahuel, sitting on the kitchen table and swinging his legs absently.

"Do you feel any better?" she asks.

"A little," he says. He glances over at her in the dark. "You look hot."

Leah looks down at her white tank top and panties and bare arms and legs and feet. She is highly flushed. Either her fever is getting out of hand or she's about to explode in a fountain of blood. "You mean I look warm, or I look pretty?" she asks very seriously.

Nahuel grins toothily. "I haven't decided yet."

_—taken for a—back home—you're not even—_

The voices cut through their flirtation, and Leah feels herself growing annoyed at the interruption. "Well," she says, too-loud, loud enough to hear her own voice over the imaginary ones, "I think I'm coming down with something."

Nahuel turns to her and places his palm gently on the nape of her neck. He does this comfortably, familiarly, like he's checked her for fever a thousand times before. Leah finds herself wanting to bite down on something, the way a person might bite down on a stick when having a bone reset. She needs something to ground her, to keep her attached to herself before she floats away like a zeppelin. The only thing keeping her inside herself is that cool, competent hand at her nape.

"You are very warm," he says at length. "You are too warm. How long has this been going on, Leah?" His face is earnest and concerned and very, very close. She can almost count his eyelashes.

"It happens whenever you're near," she says in a whisper, her eyes sliding closed. Unseeing, Leah inclines her face toward the warm nexus where his throat meets his jaw, and inhales greedily the many scents arising from his skin and hair. She can taste him down to her bones, and it makes her want to flay the flesh from his body with her fingernails, to chew him up and swallow him, just to get some part of him inside her. Some alien force is pushing through her body in response to that intoxicating smell; some instinct begs Leah to grow large enough to consume him, body and soul. Nothing but the weight of his hand, composed and familiar against the back of her neck, can convince her not to give in to that pulsating internal expansion.

"You're getting warmer," he says, like he can hardly believe what his own mouth is saying. "I can feel it. How long has this been happening?"

_Too long_ and _not long enough_ fight each other to be first out of her mouth, so that all that emerges is a strangled groan. Her eyes pop open and Nahuel's face is still close, still concerned, and she still wants to chew him up and swallow him, so she does what seems safest and shoves him as hard as she can.

He slams against the kitchen sink with a surprised _woof_. Leah buries her face in her hands and breathes, breathes, breathes, until some of that desire to burst out of her skin subsides. She peeks up at Nahuel through her fingers.

"You're stronger than you think," he says speculatively, hands gripping the edge of the sink so hard his knuckles have turned pale. "But you're not as strong as me. You can't hurt me."

"I can," she contradicts, hopping off the table.

He only laughs mockingly in her face.

"You think you're stronger than me," says Leah heatedly, "you're gonna have to prove it, shitass. Let's fucking do this. I'll kick your ass right now."

"You couldn't if you tried," he says with exaggerated patience, like he's explaining to a toddler why it can't grow wings and fly. He walks past her, toward the open back door. "But by all means," he adds with relish, "_try_." He steps out onto the lawn.

Watching him, seeing the moonlight flicker over his exceptionally toned leg and arm muscles, Leah is willing to accept that he may be right; maybe she will only ever have a shadow of his strength. But she doesn't care. She doesn't care if she's a wave and he's a beach; she wants to crash against him until one of them wears down. Even if he is truly more powerful than she can ever hope to be, simply being near him fills her with certainty that she can't be beaten down. Not by him. Not by anything.

She follows him outside.

Leah is standing there, trying to figure out how to go about asserting her competence at ass-kicking, when Nahuel spins around impossibly fast and tackles her. And she realizes he's got it right in one way, he is stronger than her, denser too, like a lead bullet, because he tackles her twenty feet across the yard as easily as if she were made of straw and there's not a damn thing she could do about it. But she realizes she's kind of right, too: that tackle, it hurt her but it didn't _hurt_ her. It dragged her across a lawn studded with half-buried rocks and sticks, tore up her shirt, scraped the hell out of her back, but what it _didn't_ do was cow her. Whatever Nahuel is, whatever Leah is, they can fight like equals. Nahuel may not believe it, but Leah will die proving herself right.

Nahuel jumps to his feet and stands unruffled over her, as if to communicate just how little effort that tackle required of him. Leah collects her breath and lets him think he's won for a moment, then she extends one leg quick as a flash, hooks it around his ankle and overbalances him. She was hoping to get him to fall like that, but he doesn't. Still, it throws him off long enough for her to fling her arms around his stumbling legs and trip him, and he comes crashing down on top of her, trying to flail free.

"Você nunca desistir?" he grunts in her face, and she is excited to hear a trace of breathlessness behind his words. He is struggling. She wants to make him struggle more, and grips his ankles more tightly so he can't right himself.

But his hands are free; he pulls himself up and grabs a hank of her hair and snatches it unceremoniously off her scalp. This hurts enough to elicit a groan of angry pain, but not enough for her to let go. But when he loosens the fistful of hair and blows it at her like dandelion fluff, she yowls in insulted rage, wraps her fingers around one of his toes, and twists until she feels it crack. Now Nahuel is yowling in rage and pain, and he kicks her in the teeth with the injured foot and scrambles away.

Leah's mouth fills with blood and a tooth wobbles against her tongue. It hurts, but she doesn't care.

They circle each other slowly, him limping slightly, her spitting out drooly blood a few times, both of them with hands raised and eyes on fire. Then Leah gets tired of waiting and flings herself at him, but he sees it coming and sidesteps her. He grabs at her arm as she goes flying past, gets her off her feet, gets her arms wrenched behind her and squeezes like a boa constrictor. He is warm, pressed up against her back. She can feel the bare skin of his torso through the tear in her shirt. He snakes his free hand between them, finds the rip in her tank top, and probes the small of her back with his fingers before digging his nails into the flesh of her lower back. Leah arches away from him as much as she can, but he has her in a vice grip. She feels his scraping, digging fingers grow slippery and warm against the small of her back. She feels a dull ache accompanied by a spreading wet warmth in the fabric of her tank top, radiating out from the tear.

"Do you realize how easy this is for me?" he whispers in her ear. "How many times do I have to prove it?"

Leah is so tightly held by him that she doesn't worry about her own center of balance: she kicks out and up with her legs so that they can crash back down against Nahuel's, and this wrenches her enough out of his grasp that she can scramble away and resume circling. She reaches behind her to touch the wetness at her back, and feels five raw slashes to either side of her spine. Nahuel, circling opposite her, touches shiny red forefinger to thumb in a gesture that even Leah knows to take as _go fuck yourself you fucking fuck_, and then he sticks each finger in his mouth and sucks it with relish.

He _sucks her blood off his fingers_.

Leah stumbles, giving him an opening, and he's at her again, his long fingers tight around her throat. She scrabbles at his eyes with her free hands and forces him to let go; she reaches up to touch the hot streaks he left on her neck, and her fingers come away sticky with drying smears of her blood and his spit.

"Why are you such an asshole?" she whispers, pressing those fingers against her mouth. Her underwear are sopping, from the sight of him licking her blood off his hands. She wants to eat him alive.

"Why are you such a merdinha?" he retorts. Leah is pretty sure he just called her a little shit.

She likes it.

Leah reaches down with the spit-and-blood-smeared hand and brushes it against the outside of her underwear, between her legs. Yup. Totally drenched. Nahuel's mouth drops open a fraction, his eyes follow her hand's movement, so he doesn't register her next attack until it's too late. She wraps herself around him like a climbing monkey and shoves her wet fingers in his mouth, and then his eyes slide helplessly closed and they crash to the ground.

Leah sucks his lower lip into her mouth and worries it with her front teeth until he groans and presses his fingers once more against the clotting injuries in her back. Leah arches ecstatically against his fingers, almost doubling over backward, unable to discern between pain and searing enjoyment. She wants to crawl out of her own skin so Nahuel can scrape those sticky red fingernails across every unprotected surface of her. She wants to feel so much it becomes _too_ much. She wants to know how much of this she can handle before it actually kills her.

Nahuel sits up, bunches her ruined tank top up above her tits, and begins to suckle shamelessly at every part of her exposed chest. His tongue slips hotly over her nipples and sternum and the ribs just below her breasts, and his fingers are reopening the gashes in her back. Then he shoves her backward off his lap, drags her panties down to her knees, and makes himself busy between her thighs. He holds her down with one hand heavy on the flesh of her lower belly; with the other, he slides a single thin, slippery finger inside her asshole, and then he tongues her into spasms. The stars wheel above Leah, she hears night things calling and singing, the cold grass of the lawn prickles against the skin of her back and arms and legs, and this whole panorama of sights and sensations takes over her whole body, releases her mind from reality. This will almost definitely kill her.

It doesn't kill her, but it does result in an orgasm that bursts over and through and out of every part of her body. She hollers up at the sky like a banshee till her throat is hoarse and dry.

Finally she collects herself enough to look down her body at Nahuel. He is clutching himself like he's trying to strangle a snake, and Leah's not sure if that's to prevent her from approaching his precious manhood or to keep it from going off before she can get to it.

"Do you have anything?" she grunts at him. He looks momentarily confused. "Do you have any STDs?" she clarifies, in a hurry to get this out of the way.

"Oh," says Nahuel. "No."

"Are you lying to me right now?" she demands, kneeling in front of him. "Are you lying because you don't want anything to prevent me putting your dick in my mouth? Because if you turn out to be lying, I will not fuck around with play-fighting, I will straight-up shoot you with an actual gun. From a distance. Do not fucking lie to me."

Nahuel gives her a look that is somewhere between a glower and a smirk, and shakes his head slowly.

"I'm not about to beg you to suck me off, merdinha," he says. "Go to hell if you don't trust my word."

"Oh," says Leah slyly, close in his ear, "I think you'll beg." And she lets her tongue drift into and around his ear a few times, then down the side of his neck. She detours to suck up the sweat collected in the dip of his sternum, to scoop into his belly-button, to taste his hipbones, his thighs, and then she closes her lips around the tip of his cock.

She sucks on him thoughtfully, peeking up a few times to read his face. His eyes screw more and more tightly shut, but he still isn't begging. He has to beg. This is a point of pride for Leah. If he's going to insist on being the stronger of the two, she is going to insist on a full act of desperation before she lets him have what he gave her for free.

In between sucking and stroking, she busies herself with his testicles and his dark mess of pubic hair and the hidden compartment between his balls and his asshole. Every time he gets too close, she pulls back, and soon he is groaning like he's in pain, ripping out chunks of lawn with his fingers and then raking them across her scalp, so that she ends up with dirt and twigs and grass roots stuck in her hair.

He is close. He's in agony. "Beg," she instructs him, and the muscles of his stomach tense and fold as he hunches over her bobbing, cocksucking head, his legs splayed and his filthy hands hanging onto to her tank top like reins. She peers up at him in time to see him shake his head minutely, eyes closed. This won't do; Leah digs her fingers into his hips as hard as she can, teases him unconcernedly with her tongue, and orders him again to _beg_.

He is trying not to, she can tell. His whole upper body is bent forward, she's in a little warm cave made of Nahuel's curving torso, and his hair brushes her back as he leans over her, trying so hard not to beg.

But he does, in the end. Just one tiny, whispered "_Please_," and Leah finishes him, keeping her mouth clamped firmly around him until he's done coming. He flops onto his back and stares up at the stars like she did just a few minutes ago. She crawls over him, puffs up her cheeks, and hawks her mouthful of spitty semen all over his face and chest. He doesn't flinch, which is a disappointment, but after a second he grabs her wrist and twists her on top of him, wiping his come-spattered face clean on her breasts.

"What the hell are you?" he mutters after a while, his lips muffled against her neck. "I can't even decide if you're human."

"That's what I keep trying to figure out, asshole," she says. "Hey, Nahuel?" He turns his face and she turns hers and they look at each other, their noses almost touching, breathing each other's air. His skin is so smooth, so young. His eyes are so old.

"Yes?"

"How old are you?"

"A hundred and sixty," he says without pausing to think.

Leah laughs and casually slaps his face. She climbs off him, pulls her panties up and her tank top down. Then she returns to the house to finish her night's sleep, one hand curved around her back to drape comfortably over the five small wounds he gave her.

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading and reviewing, my dearest merdinhas.<strong>


	6. The Paved Road or the Minefield?

Leah wakes well and truly several hours later, when the sun is up. She's not sure at first just how much of the previous night was fever-dream; but when she moves, her shredded tank-top sticks to her back. She twists to see her back side in the mirror. There's not a scratch on her, but she's covered in tea-colored dry blood, bits of grass and conifer needles, scabs that peel off without so much as a twinge, and a graveyard's worth of dirt.

Leah strips her bed and starts a load of laundry. She can't hear anyone else in the house, so she doesn't think twice about taking a long, hot bath with her iPod on blast. By the time she's drying off, her laundry's ready.

Just as she's plopping on the couch to start folding her warm clothes, she hears a car door slam and footsteps up the porch stairs, then a tentative knocking.

Mark is standing outside the front door with a smile on his face, a bag of groceries in one hand and a single long-stem rose in the other.

"Mark," she says, flooding with guilt at her perfunctory dismissal of him last night. "Hi." He kisses her hello and heads for the kitchen. Leah follows him, bewildered by his sudden take-charge demeanor. She's not totally thrilled that he just showed up here without alerting her—what if she'd been out, or busy, or not in the mood to see him?—but she acknowledges that if she felt more strongly about him it would probably count as romantic. Anyway, he appears to have brought her food, which she's not disposed to turn down.

"Since we couldn't finish our date last night," he says, "I figured at least we could enjoy a nice Sunday brunch. What d'you think?"

"I think...I'm sorry I had to kick you out last night."

"That's okay," he says, opening a tub of cream cheese. "You can tell me all about it. Over brunch." Leah looks down, picks at her nails. "Hey," Mark says softly, "I know you're going through a really hard time right now. I'm not upset about last night. I want to know you. And I want you to feel comfortable with me, no matter what. Okay?"

"Okay."

Leah abandons her laundry and sits down at the kitchen table, right where Nahuel's butt was last night, and lets Mark fix her brunch. He does the whole nine, slicing fruit and pouring juice and spreading her cream cheese for her like she doesn't know how to do it herself. It's a little irritating, but also a little sweet. Leah can't decide which it is more.

She is actually kind of starving, since she didn't really have breakfast, so Leah ploughs through a whole lot of brunch while explaining to Mark about Nahuel. Or trying to, at least. She doesn't mention the fucking, but not because of guilt: she and Mark have definitely not declared exclusivity and she wouldn't even if he asked her to. No, she doesn't mention the fucking only because it was hers and she doesn't feel inclined to share.

But she explains other things, like how Jake was her eye in the storm, how he left without warning and didn't come back for nine months, and when he finally did he had his own newer, better eye in the storm.

"We had this huge fight the night before he left," she says, swiping orange juice pulp from the inner walls of the glass and licking it off her fingers. "It wasn't even about anything. I called his friend a spoiled brat or something stupid like that. God, and then he was gone the next morning and all I got were a few texts saying he was safe and not to worry about him."

"So, who are you really mad at, here?" asks Mark.

"I don't know," she admits. "Maybe both. I still don't think I said anything bad enough to justify what he did. God, at least I didn't leave him. But maybe that's what it felt like to him. Maybe he thought I was saying I wouldn't be there for him. But I would. I always will. Emily got me. Sam got me. And Jake got me. And now only one of them is left and I know I'm going to fuck it up just because I can't stop trying to fight with everyone I care about, everyone who understands what I am."

"Oh, babe," he says sympathetically, scooching his chair closer so he can put his arm around her. "You can fight with me. I won't take off. I promise."

"When he finally came back, he was different. He seemed older and more...in control of himself, maybe. Smarter. He went to Ireland to visit his friend in a cancer clinic over there, and then she got better and came back, and he came back too, and he really seems like he's getting his life on track. I mean, he seems like it. He's not miserable all the time. He doesn't lash out at people anymore, which he was doing for a while. It's like he came back cured. Of everything."

"That sounds wonderful," says Mark.

"I'm happy for him. Except then a couple weeks after he came back, Nahuel showed up out of nowhere. Some guy Jake met in Ireland. Best friends, overnight. And it's so obvious, Mark, so fucking obvious, that all of Jake's happiness, all of his newfound love for life, it all came from Nahuel. He went off and got better, and I stayed here and got worse. Every time I see Nahuel I just want to poke his eyes out and shove them down his throat." Mark shifts uneasily at this; Leah should be more careful about how she expresses her violent streak, when soft breakable boyfriends are in range.

"So, what happened last night?"

Leah feels her face grow hot. "Nahuel was gone for a couple weeks, and everything started to go back to normal, and then he showed up without warning last night, and I...I don't know. I just couldn't handle being around anyone right then. I'm sorry I made you leave. I know it was rude." She can't come up with anything better than that. She thinks about the instant she realized Nahuel was back, and how swiftly the understanding came to her that she would be thinking of no one but him for the rest of the night. That memory carries implications she is not yet ready to face, although in fairness to Mark, she should really figure it out sooner rather than later.

Leah finishes her brunch quietly, and Mark doesn't try to make her talk. Then he offers to help her fold her laundry, and they are sitting there in silence when there are more footsteps up onto the porch, and Jake lets himself into the house with Nahuel right behind. Mark gives Leah a secret solidarity-ish look, and then goes back to matching socks.

"Hey, Lee," says Jake, tossing his arm casually around her shoulders for a brief hug. "Miss me?"

"Always," she says, hugging his arm without turning around. "Jake, you smell like seven wet dogs tied together with seaweed. What have you been up to?"

Jake laughs and then runs upstairs, whistling. Soon, Leah hears the shower running.

Nahuel rummages in the kitchen for a little while and then joins Mark and Leah in the living room. They are almost done with her laundry, and soon they will leave and go hang out somewhere else, maybe catch a movie in town or something. If nothing else, spending a whole day with him should help Leah figure out how she feels. She can think of nothing else now as she matches up socks and piles them neatly in the laundry basket.

While Nahuel was gone, she felt for Mark what she felt for Sam, early on: the pleasant, comforting excitement of a new person to know, a new mind to plumb, a new body to explore. Of course, Sam was her first, so he came with an added element of uncertainty (would she know what to do? Would he?). But one thing is the same: a sensation of embarking on a long, well-known journey with someone she can already trust not to dick her over deliberately, someone she already knows is normal, sane and kind enough to provide ballast for her own careering sanity. Whether or not what she has with Mark ever goes anywhere, up until last night she enjoyed it, didn't want to lose it until it had run its course, didn't want anything else to take its place.

Then Nahuel showed up again and she was hurled off the safety of the path she's been on with Mark. She knows what she will get, with Mark. As long as they both want it, they will have a healthy, respectful, caring friendship, full of anniversary markers and Sunday brunches, and regular Friday-night dates where she actually dresses up. It is what she had with Sam. It is what she has wanted, ever since she was old enough to know that such relationships exist. Leah knows better than to be dismissive of these relationships simply because they lack adventure. For one thing, she's had enough excitement for a lifetime. For another, she's seen plenty of relationships succeed or fail on the strength of their participants' ability to commit to small rituals that reinforce their bond. Rituals like Sunday brunch, and anniversary dinners. Even the most unromantic ritual of all, scheduled sex—to which she and Mark have certainly not yet turned, though she and Sam sometimes did—possesses specific value in maintaining a relationship that sure as hell isn't going to maintain itself. These things are not automatically bad just because they don't make for thrilling stories in the retelling. And Leah has had so little stability in her life of late that she should take whatever she can get.

On the other hand…

The things she feels for Nahuel are _real_. So vividly real that they make the rest of her life look faded and washed-out in comparison. She doesn't want to date Nahuel. She wouldn't want to celebrate a single anniversary with him, even if they remained in each other's lives long enough to do so. She doesn't want to enjoy the small pleasures of life with him. If he ever presented her with a single long-stemmed de-thorned red rose, she'd probably ram it up his nose.

She wants to bludgeon him into submission and suck the marrow from his bones and crow over his prone body. She wants to beat him till he whimpers for mercy through broken teeth. She wants him to plant his cock inside her like a shovel into fertile earth, or a dagger into some vital organ. She wants him to fuck her into unconsciousness, to claw her open and slurp the filth from her steaming belly, smiling like an angel all the time. No way can this riot of emotions last. It will drain her, if she lets it. And, beyond his one stated rule, she has no idea what Nahuel wants, because he's never told her. She's never asked.

While Leah is struggling with these conflicting desires, Nahuel's slender brown hand dips into the laundry basket and retrieves a ravelly, linty, stained mess: her tank top from last night.

"Meu Deus, merdinha," he says conversationally, dangling the tattered garment from his fingers, "you're hard on clothes."

Leah shoots him a mean look, stands up and grabs the tank top, but Nahuel doesn't let go of it. He's watching her face. Leah feels Mark's eyes on her and is irrationally pissed at him for being there.

"You want to start wearing my clothes?" she says.

Nahuel leans forward a fraction of an inch. A smile teases around the corners of his lips. "Não, e eu não quero que você usar roupas, também." She has no idea what that means, but from the way he's looking at her she gathers it must be dirty. Shameless boy.

To Leah's left, Mark shifts in his seat. She huffs and relinquishes the tank top. "Whatever," she says. Nahuel drops the shirt back into the laundry basket, leans back in his chair, and buries himself in his book.

Leah heads up to her room to put away her neatly-folded laundry and make her bed. When she comes back down, Mark is in the bathroom. She's been dating him long enough to understand this could take a while. Leah puts her shoes on and settles on the couch to wait.

After a few minutes, she catches herself staring at Nahuel. He's reading the same thing again, _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_. He looks at her over the top of the book.

"What?" he says.

"Nothing." Then, "What's your book about?"

"It's an autobiography of a dead guy," he says.

"Mm," she says. "Anyone I know?"

"I doubt it. Brás Cubas is completely fictitious."

"Is it any good?" she asks.

Nahuel looks at her speculatively for a moment, then flips back to an earlier page in the book. He reads aloud, "'Marcela amou-me durante quinze meses e onze contos de réis; nada mais.'"

"What does that mean?" says Leah.

"'Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven thousand réis; nothing more,'" he translates. "I bet you and Marcela would get on like wildfire."

"Very funny."

"I wonder what Mark would think of Marcela," he says. Leah pretends to not know what he means.

"I don't really know his literary tastes," she says.

"Haven't you been dating for a while now?"

"Only a little over one month. It's not serious."

"I bet he would like it to be," he says. "He kept glaring at me when he thought I wouldn't notice. Or maybe he hoped I would. How much do you tell him?"

"Nothing important," she says. "It's pretty casual."

"You keep saying that, maybe it'll come true. He seems nice."

"He is." She stands and walks over to him. He puts down his book and looks up at her with a faint, eager smile. "What would you do if Mark and I were serious?" she asks, testing him. Nahuel's hand drifts slyly up between Leah's legs, a blaze of warmth accompanying his touch.

"As much as you let me," he says, leaning forward to kiss the narrow slip of belly visible between her tank top and her jeans. She slips her fingers into his hair and leans over him, breathing heavily, her legs unsure. Nahuel works his clever fingers against a particular spot between her thighs, and even through her jeans she responds with a warm wet internal thrill. Then he unbuttons her pants with a smooth flick of thumb and forefinger, slides his hand into the opening, and sinks his two middle fingers inside of her while rubbing her earnestly with his palm and the pad of his thumb. She hopes he has dirt under his nails.

"How do you keep doing this to me?" she mutters desperately as the tension builds and builds down low in her pelvis. Nahuel's free hand slinks around to knead her ass, not at all gently. His teeth scrape experimentally across her hip bone, leaving vibrant red welts in her skin. A second later, she feels the delayed sting from his frighteningly sharp teeth, and sucks in her breath in pleasure.

"I think about it a lot," he says, looking up at her briefly before turning his attention to her other hip bone.

"How much?" She hisses as his teeth slice through a layer of skin at the bottom of her belly, leaving a thin red line no deeper than a papercut. Nahuel's lips fasten onto the few small droplets of blood that quickly well up.

"Mm," he says, his fingers dragging her closer and closer to the edge, "if I'm looking at you, just assume that I am thinking about this. And if I'm not looking at you. Assume it then, too."

"Good to know I'm—not the only—the only—" she can't finish her sentence, she's too busy spiraling on the updraft of an orgasm, wheeling above the clouds like a bird.

She only comes crashing down when the toilet flushes twice in a row, sounding distant and insultingly irrelevant. Leah tears herself away from Nahuel with a creaking unwillingness, and buttons up her pants just as Mark enters the living room. She collects her things, grabs a jacket she knows she won't need, and she and Mark head out. She looks back at Nahuel once, and he is holding his warm, damp fingers against his nose and mouth. He smiles and waves those fingers at her cheekily before she closes and locks the door.

* * *

><p>Leah thinks carefully all day, and decides that whatever she ends up wanting, she shouldn't take it as a given that Mark agrees with her on the nature of their present arrangement. So she makes a point of mentioning over dinner that she considers their relationship a casual one, entirely too preliminary for any talk of exclusivity to enter into it, and he makes clear that this won't work for him, and by the time he's dropping her off that evening, they have pretty much concluded the whole affair. He's a little disappointed, she's a little sorry; but neither of them is heartbroken. She can still have everything she had with Sam, with Mark; she'll just need to have it with someone new, if she decides she wants it badly enough.<p>

After she kisses Mark solemnly on the cheek and climbs out of his car for the last time, Leah follows her nose around to the back of the house, where Nahuel and Jake are hanging out, grilling hot dogs and drinking beer.

"Lee!" exclaims Jake, bouncing to his feet to hug her. She hugs him back, trying to match his enthusiasm.

"Good evening, Lee," says Nahuel sardonically, lifting his bottle to her.

"Only Jake gets to call me that."

"Sorry," says Nahuel. "I'll stick with merdinha?"

Jake kicks Nahuel casually out of his lawn chair. "Come on, man, don't be an ass to my cousin."

"No," says Leah, "it's okay. If he calls me merdinha I get to call him fuckwad, so, you know." She turns to go inside.

"Aw, stay," pleads Jake, anxiously watching her. "Hang out with us. I feel like I never see you anymore. And I'm leaving soon."

"You're leaving?" This is news to Leah. "Where are you going?"

"Nahuel and I have to go on a trip. You'll have the house to yourself again. We're leaving in about a week, so we should hang out while we can."

"How long are you going to be gone?" asks Leah, dismayed.

"I don't know," he says. "We just found out about it. Hopefully not more than like, a week or two?"

This news is sudden and unwelcome, but it does convince Leah to join them in a drink or three. She drops her bag off in the kitchen and then settles in a folding chair. Jake passes her a beer and a hot dog, and she has to admit it's actually pretty nice, sitting out here under the stars, with the waxing moon just starting to rise, and the forest coming to life around them. All the lights in the house are off; their only illumination comes from the glowing coals on the grill, but Leah can see quite well. And she's in her usual tank top and jeans, but she doesn't feel cold. After the night and the day she's just had, the fact that she can sit peacefully with her friends and stargaze feels like a win.

Leah lets her mind drift while Jake and Nahuel talk about the Cullens, whom they both seem to know quite well. Then they start dropping names she doesn't recognize: Ness, Jae, Ard, Tadi.

"Who's Tadi?" asks Leah suddenly. Jake jumps at the sound of her voice.

"Sorry, Leah, I thought you were asleep," he says.

"I'm not."

It doesn't look like anyone is going to explain who Tadi is, and Leah feels her sleepy contentment evaporating like mist. More secrets. Finally, Nahuel speaks up. "Tadi's one of our friends from Ireland."

Jake is flapping his hand at Nahuel under his seat, trying to shut him up, but Leah sees this and it only raises her ire. Why do there have to be so many mysteries? Why can't Jake just be honest with her for once? Now Nahuel is the one being forthcoming? Why can't Jake just tell her what the hell is going on in his life?

Leah feels her beer bottle start to crack and forces herself to relax her fingers.

"So," she says, "what's the nature of your relationship with her? You dating? Or are you still waiting for Bella Swan to dump her boyfriend?"

If it were a year ago, Jake would be sweating and embarrassed right now, but instead he just laughs.

"Nah," he says. "I'm over that. Bella's awesome but you know she's also like my third cousin or something. And Tadi's way too old for me."

"Is she old enough for Nahuel?" asks Leah innocently.

There is a long, awkward pause, which is finally broken by a snort of laughter from Nahuel.

"Definitely too old for him, too," says Jake, glaring.

"Oh, of course," says Leah, standing up. She kisses Jake on the cheek. "Good night, kid. Love you."

"Love you too, Lee."

Nahuel tilts his beer bottle toward her and inclines his head. She nods grimly at him and departs.

* * *

><p><strong>There will be drama soon, so enjoy this relatively calm chapter while you can, my friends! <strong>

**One canon-compliant tweak I've made is that all hybrids are born with one dose of venom. You will recall that Renesmee bit Bella on the heart as soon as she was born; I interpret this to mean that she was instinctively deploying a mouthful of venom to turn her mother, although this was kind of moot since Edward moved in with the syringe of heavy-duty vampire fluid right after. I imagine that Nahuel's three sisters used theirs on either Joham or whichever hybrid sister was present for the birth. I say this so that you don't wonder why Nahuel can bite Leah without ill effects. He used up all the venom he had on Huilen, in the minutes after he was born. He has turned no one since then.**


	7. Answers, on Condition

Leah wakes when the light from the moon hits her full in the face. As an incentive to move in with him, Jake gave her the best bedroom in the house. The room is on a corner, with windows in two walls to let in lots of fresh air, but the downside is that if she's not strict about closing the shades a full moon is easily bright enough to wake her in the middle of the night. She doesn't wish to sleep any more just now, so she sits in the shabby, comfortable old armchair next to the largest window, curls her feet up underneath her, allows her eyes to wander aimlessly outside, and thinks. As long as Nahuel's around, she can expect this to be her new normal: disturbed sleep cycles, fevers, mood swings.

There is good to this, and bad. The mood swings present several practical obstacles, as well as mental; somehow she still has to go to work and school and get along with people, despite what her temper might want. And although she feels almost scandalously alive, she also has few opportunities for mental restfulness. She feels everything so acutely. That's great when what she's feeling is pleasure or some similarly positive sensation, but not when what she's feeling is anger, sadness, or resentment. But feeling everything too much is still a more desirable state than its predecessor, total numbness. Even when she's angry, or petulant, or belligerent, she's still alive, and that's more blessing than curse. Leah finds herself rejoicing in the firmness of the worn armchair under her legs, the prick of leg stubble under her hands, the swish of her hair against the sensitive skin of her back.

A flicker of movement on the lawn below catches her attention: Jake and Nahuel, heading toward the treeline. Nahuel is fully clothed, but Jake isn't. He's in shorts again, no shirt, no shoes. He pauses at the treeline to shimmy out of his shorts and stuff them into a little pouch he has inexplicably tied to his ankle. Then he and his bare ass vanish into the trees, followed by Nahuel.

_—should talk to Leah—you don't think she's—don't know, but you should still talk to—leaving soon—deal with it when we finish with your—_

The voices slip into her consciousness so naturally that they don't even startle her. One is Jake's, and one is Nahuel's. A few more join them, soon: a woman's, low and authoritative, although Leah cannot clearly hear what that voice is saying. And a man's, smooth as a church bell.

Leah stands (still revelling in sensations: the old hooked rug beneath her feet, the night-smell coming in through the window, the tender way her thighs brush against each other as she walks) and goes downstairs, heedless in her tank top and underwear. She walks outside, following Jake's and Nahuel's footsteps into the trees. Her bare toes grip the needle-strewn ground. Leah is in a dream-state, following her senses. She has passed beyond moods and opinions. Right now, Leah simply _is_.

_—need to get serious about finding him—must be scared—confused—disoriented—_

She's not sure if she's going wherever Jake went, but that doesn't matter. She just wants to be out here under this moon with him, feeling this air and this ground and hearing these night insects. She has a comforting sensation of being a problem for someone else to solve; a few seconds later, she can't figure out why she had that thought.

Leah has no idea how long she slinks through the woods in her dream-state. She is dogged by no tiredness, her feet do not protest this shoeless meandering, and the damp cold air never troubles her. The voices come and go, come and go, and she is drawn in by them, beckoned, protected.

The sky is starting to lighten through the trees in the east when Leah hears a footstep. She can't be sure how she knows it as a footstep; the woods are loud before sunrise, certainly noisier than most people would think. But she knows it as a footstep, and not a human one.

Before she can fully process this errant thought, a woman appears in the darkness before her. Tall, black, with a cloud of natural hair floating gorgeously around her shapely face. The woman wears a long, men's t-shirt, and nothing else.

"What are you doing here?" says the woman, sounding surprised to see Leah.

"I don't know," Leah answers honestly. She does not think of the woman's question as rude or inappropriate, merely direct. "I'm Leah. Who are you?"

"I'm Tadi," says the woman. "You should not be out here, child. It is late." For some curious reason, when the woman speaks Leah feels a powerful instinct to listen, attentively and with respect. Tadi exudes authority. Her dark brown eyes are kind.

"I was following my cousin Jake," says Leah. Some of the dreamlike state begins to drift away from her, and her legs start to feel the burn of walking all night. "I don't know why. He mentioned your name earlier. But he wouldn't say who you are."

"I'm an elder," says the woman.

"I've met all the elders."

"And now you've met me," Tadi says, smiling. She walks a few impossibly long strides, and then takes the liberty of reaching out to touch Leah's cheek with one cautious hand. But it doesn't feel presumptuous. It feels almost maternal. "Jacob has told me of you, Leah. So has Nahuel. But I knew of you before that."

"Why? Who are you to me?"

"We are relations," says Tadi. Her velvety voice wraps around Leah pleasantly. "I keep an eye on all of my family. There are not many left in your tribe. You, your mother, your brother Seth. That is all."

"Are you related to Jake?"

"Not by blood," says Tadi. "But he is dear to me."

The sky above them is pearly-gray by now. Leah feels suddenly weary, heavy in her body. Her legs start throbbing from the long walk.

"Do you know the way back to your home?" says Tadi. "I can walk with you, if you want."

"I can get back," says Leah. "When Jake and Nahuel disappear—where do they go?"

"They come to see me," says Tadi. "You may come to see me, too, if you wish."

"Are you a ghost?" says Leah unexpectedly.

Tadi laughs, a rich, throaty, not-at-all-ghostlike sound. "I am no ghost," she says. "I am family. Now that we've met, I hope we will meet again."

"I'd like that," says Leah shyly. Tadi presses Leah's hand, and then vanishes silently in the direction she came from. Leah shakes her head a few times, to get the fuzziness out, and turns back toward home. She does know these woods well; she is able to shorten her journey back considerably by taking a few shortcuts. She is nearly there when she hears another step nearby.

"Tadi?" she says aloud. "Is that you?"

"Leah?" calls Nahuel. After a few moments, he has materialized on her path. "What are you doing out here?" He sounds as surprised to see her as Tadi did.

"I just met a ghost," says Leah dreamily. "I mean, she said she's not a ghost, but who believes her? That's exactly the kind of thing a ghost _would_ say."

"Who is this ghost?"

"Your friend Tadi. Tall, hot and mysterious. Who even _is_ that lady?"

Nahuel looks amused. "Tadi is very interesting, is she not? Did she tell you that you share blood?"

"Yes," says Leah. "She even said it like that. What is it with you people and blood?"

Nahuel laughs comfortably, not answering. He catches sight of Leah's filthy, scraped-up feet and hisses in sympathy. "Leah, how long have you been out here?"

"As long as you have, I guess. I wasn't following you or anything, but I came outside after you and Jake went into the woods."

"Don't your feet hurt?"

Leah shrugs. "Nahuel?" She is about to do a very stupid thing. Just enough of the dream-state remains clinging to her that she thinks she can brave telling him about the voices. "What was it you wanted Jake to talk to me about? Earlier tonight, I mean."

Nahuel freezes. "Tonight?" he asks, affecting nonchalance.

"I heard you telling Jake he should talk to me. You said it a couple times."

"You said you weren't following us," he says, almost accusingly.

"I wasn't. I heard it in my head."

Now is the perfect time for Nahuel to act like she's crazy. Now is the perfect time for him to shut her down, but of course he doesn't. He looks at her steadily, and his eyes seem sad, or pitying, or kind.

"What's happening to me?" she whispers.

"Jacob said—"

"Dammit, Nahuel, I _heard_. Tell me. Please. Please tell me, man, I need you to tell me—"

"You're turning into a werewolf," he says bluntly. He is looking her in the eye; he doesn't seem to be kidding. She takes a deep breath. That's it? That's the story they're going with? She feels her chest and neck and face flush with embarrassment. She wishes bitterly that she'd kept her questions to herself.

"A werewolf. Hilarious," she says, and turns away. Nahuel grabs her hand, but she jerks out of reach. "You know, asshole, I was coming to you as a friend. Could you not just go with me on it, like, this one time?"

"I am your friend," he says desperately. "I am telling you—"

"You're not telling me shit," she spits. "You're mocking me. Maybe I have that coming, I know I'm a trainwreck. Still a douche move, _friend_. Werewolf, my ass."

Nahuel reaches for her hand again, and she punches him in the face.

While Nahuel is swearing and cupping his nose and bleeding all over the place, Leah knees him in the chest. Before she can back off, he swipes at her, grabs her wrist. Her vision is swimming.

They tousle, pushing and shoving, until they overbalance onto the ground.

"Do we really have to go through all this before you'll listen to me?" he demands. Enraged, she punches him hard enough to feel the skin split delicately along his cheekbone: just a tiny little cut, but enough to hurt him, enough to provoke him. He scrabbles for her arms and tries to hold her still, but she writhes away and kicks out. He grabs her ankle and flips her head-over-heels, and before she's finished reeling from the upset to her center of gravity, he is on top of her, holding her down with a firm hand. Leah's fingers close around a smooth, fist-sized rock, and without pausing ro think she bashes it into his eye. He whirls away with a scream of pain, and then she is grabbing his ankle, evading his defensive kicks aimed at her face and chest. One of them makes contact with her throat, not hard enough even to bruise her but definitely hard enough to hurt like a bitch. She swallows compulsively several times before her breath is willing to resume regulating itself properly. When she next looks over at him, the skin below Nahuel's left eye is mottling purple and swelling up like a mushroom in good dark earth. He is crouching a few feet away, watching her warily, his lower face sticky with blood from his nose. Leah crawls over to him, her sore ribs protesting every time she moves. She tries to get a look at his eye, but he jolts away from her.

"Let me see," she instructs, and just like that he goes still so that she can check the cornea for cuts. "It's okay," she says. "Your eye is okay."

What occurs next is so anticipated that they both fall easily into it: Nahuel slides his hand around to the back of her neck, and kisses her hungrily; and she kisses him back, raking her nails down his densely-muscled sides and stomach. Leah does not even think of being turned away by the taste of blood on his lips. Then Nahuel's hands are on her hips, sliding under the elastic waistband of her shorts, nudging into her panties and rubbing her in a way that makes her bend and convulse over him, out of her mind with sensation.

"Wait," she pants, "wait, I want to—"

She kicks out of her underwear while he wriggles out of his, and she is privately saying a thousand prayers of thanks that she just got on birth control again. She told herself she was getting it for Mark.

Such a liar.

Then Leah is rubbing herself against Nahuel until she's once again halfway to comeville, and she wants this so fucking bad, nothing will break this fever like he will, he's the only one who can—

"I'm on serious no-baby meds," she whispers in his ear, "you wanna fuck like grownups?" His pretty eyes go wide and he nods emphatically, then spreads his warm brown hands across her waist and guides her onto him. His grip is the only thing preventing her from evaporating straight out of her own body. Nahuel makes her float, every goddamn time.

Nahuel's right hand goes to work on her front and the other hand creeps around back. She rides him vigorously for a few minutes before her orgasm overtakes her.

Then she starts moving her hips again, but Nahuel seems indecisive. Leah correctly interprets the look on his face and announces,

"You don't have to, but you can come in me if you want."

"Are you sure you want me to?"

Her only answer is to yank several hairs from his groin. Nahuel winces, grins, and starts fucking her in earnest, deftly directing her hips with his hands. Leah rubs herself until she comes again, and then _he_ does, and at last she is curled up on his sweaty chest whimpering like a puppy while he stares glassy-eyed at the pale-gray sky above. His fingertips trace sweaty designs against her naked back, and his breath is hoarse and exhausted in her ear.

Leah pulls herself together after a little while and climbs off of Nahuel. His semen dribbles down the inside of her leg. She scrapes off as much of it as she can with her hand, and flicks it off into the undergrowth. Nahuel sits up and looks at her.

"Do you believe that I have no desire to be cruel to you?" he asks quietly, and his question reminds Leah that she's mad at him, or supposed to be. She doesn't feel it at the moment. She just feels pleasantly tired.

"I don't know you all that well," she says.

"You know me well enough for that," he insists. "Do you believe that I don't want you to suffer? That I would never want to be a reason for your suffering?"

"I believe that," she says at last.

"Then I think you need to talk to Jacob."

"About werewolves." At the word, she feels herself growing angry again.

"How long have you heard voices?"

"Since you got here, Nahuel, God, I don't know—"

"One of the voices—it is Tadi's?"

Leah stares at him suspiciously. "I never said that."

"But it's true?"

She nods slowly.

"Jacob has answers. And he will have some questions of his own."

"Well, he could have come to me any old time he felt like it."

"He didn't know it was happening to you. None of us knew. I admit that I allowed myself to become distracted by all of _this_." He waves his hand vaguely at the crushed undergrowth, the strewn clothes, her naked form. "But I should have seen it long ago. No ordinary human can do to me what you have done."

"Jesus, Nahuel…" The melodrama is strong with this one.

"You don't have to believe me," he says quickly. "Just talk to Jacob. Please?"

"I'll talk to him. Christ. Get up off my back about it." She finishes dressing, and flees for the relative safety of her own bed.

* * *

><p>When Leah goes downstairs, Jake and Tadi are both sitting in the living room, waiting for her. Although Jake has considerably more mass than Tadi, she carries an undeniable aura of power which he lacks.<p>

"Nahuel told me you guys got in a fight," he says without preamble.

"Oh he did, did he?" says Leah, groggy and provoked at once.

"He told me you were really strong."

"That's funny," sneers Leah, "he told _me_ I _wasn't_."

"I don't think you understand how strong Nahuel is," says Jake. "The fact that you were able to get a single hit in—that's like, huge. And you made him bleed. You broke his skin. I saw him on my way to the house. You really fucked up his face."

"Yeah, I know," says Leah, "I was there."

"Nahuel's so tough most knives can't even hurt him. But you did. Hey, are you the one who bit him? Like a month ago he had a bite mark on his neck. Was that you?"

"So what if it was?"

"Why were you biting him, again?" Jake asks, carefully not looking Leah in the eyes. Like Nahuel, Jake does not exhibit horror so much as surprised curiosity at the fact that Leah bit a living person, _on the neck_, like a vampire. Or perhaps, surprise that she succeeded in biting Nahuel, specifically.

"It was never very clear," answers Leah. "So you're saying Nahuel is some kind of superman."

"Some kind, yes," agrees Jake. "He's not the only one. Tadi and Jae and Ard and I...god, this sounds crazy. I'm about to sound completely crazy. Shit, I don't even know how to say it..."

"It'll be nice not to be the crazy one for once," says Leah, glancing over at Tadi, who so far has sat in perfect silence. She doesn't say the word _werewolf_. Let Jake be the one to say it, if that's where he wants to take this.

"We are protectors," says Tadi, quietly but distinctly. As she speaks, Jake re-orients his whole body toward her, which seems weird. What's weirder is that Leah does this too, without even meaning to. "There are people out there who are like Nahuel," she says in that low, cool voice. "These people are so strong and so hard to kill, but Nahuel's helping us to keep those people away from the rez and away from the town. Away from _you_."

Something clicks in Leah's mind. "Like Nahuel's dad?" she says. "He told me he's way stronger than him, and it sounds like the guy is kind of a huge prick."

"Joham is," Tadi agrees gravely "an unfathomably huge prick. And he is far from the only one of his kind. He belongs to an ancient order of individuals who share his strength and his resilience. There are many others like him. Many others _worse_ than him."

"Like a cult," says Leah, finally getting it. Tadi nods once, solemnly. "Oh lord. Okay, let's say I believe you at all. This is all so vague. What makes you think any of this has anything to do with me?"

"The fact that you're so strong is kind of a giveaway," Jake cuts in. "It happened to me, too. If you recall, I used to be a twig with legs." It's true: he did sort of blossom overnight.

"But _why_ am I so strong?" Leah asks impatiently. "Why is Nahuel? Why are you? Why do people want to hurt us? Can you try to tell me without being so damn euphemistic about it? What's actually going on?" She gulps, suddenly realizing what they've been talking around, and why. "Were Sam and Emily a part of this?" She feels cold and numb, shocked at the thought that she might finally learn the truth.

Tadi places one hand softly over Leah's cold and trembling fingers, and slowly Leah feels warmth returning. "They were victims of the kind of people we fight against," Tadi explains gently. "Emily and Claire, Sam and Jared, your uncle—they were targeted because it was believed they possessed information. When they could not provide it, they were murdered."

"What information?" asks Leah. "Who did it? Do you know? Do you have a name?" Her heart, already thrumming like a snapped wire, speeds up. She wants a name.

"A man and a woman, working together," says Tadi. "James and Victoria. Jake caught James with Billy, and exacted a swift and brutal revenge. James is dead. Jake killed him in this very room." Leah starts and looks around her, as though she might see blood and viscera dripping down the walls; but of course the room looks the same as it ever did.

"Later, Jake traveled to Ireland and found Victoria there. Working with Bella Swan and the rest of the Cullens, he killed her as well. The perpetrators of this evil crime have been punished, Leah. They are dead. It is not justice, but it is all you are likely to get_—_for now."

That gives her pause. "For now?" she says hesitantly. Tadi takes a deep breath.

"You're strong," she says. "You could be stronger. Strong enough to fight with us_—_if you choose to. These people carry out a dazzling array of operations. The two who murdered your friends_—_they were nobody. Nomads. They would not even appear as a blip on the radar of the leaders of their cult. Jake dispatched them without any experience at all. But there are others. Better fighters, more brutal in their methods, more organized. We need help. We always need help."

"You want me to help you fight an entire cult?" says Leah quietly. "Why would you think I could do that? I've gotten in a couple fights, but I'm no expert."

"You've been hearing voices," Jake points out.

"Yeah, and I'm still waiting for you to explain what that's all about," says Leah. "Where did it all _come_ from?" Jake shifts eagerly in his seat.

"I could tell you," says Tadi with a quelling look at Jake. "But you would be unlikely to believe me. And if you decide you have no wish to join us in our fight, the less you know the better."

"If I do decide to help you guys...what happens next? Do you start training me or what?"

"You would come with us to meet Bella Swan. If you are truly qualified to join us, you will know it when you see her. If you are, as you have suggested, unqualified, then we will know it when we see you with her. But Leah, I must tell you, child: _if_ you decide you wish to fight beside us, and _if_ our suspicions about your abilities prove accurate when tested in Bella's presence, then nearly everything about your life will change. You will find yourself thrown into a world which operates by rules you have yet to learn. Your senses will feel as strange and new to you as if you were newly born. You will look with new eyes, hear with new ears. You will be given answers, but we do not possess every answer. Some you will have to learn for yourself. The decision is yours. I was not offered this choice. Jake was not offered a choice; nor were our brother-fighters, Jae and Ard. Most of us were flung into our new lives, our new roles, without reference to our own wishes. "

"The blue pill or the red pill," Leah mutters.

"She means_—_" Jake begins helpfully.

"I've seen the movie," says Tadi with a small, indulgent smile in Jake's direction. "You are exactly right, Leah. There are no guarantees. Only a choice."

"If you'd been allowed to choose," says Leah quietly, "what would you have done?"

A stillness descends upon the three of them. Jake 's eyes are glued to Tadi's. Leah can't quite decide what it is she sees on his face: it seems to be some blend of admiration, reverence, affection, fear, anticipation, and intimate closeness. Leah looks down at her hands and waits for an answer.

"I know my place in the order of things," Tadi says at last. "I have seen every edge of the world; every rock and blade of grass, every running river has passed beneath my gaze. I have fought against evil, and won, not once or twice but a thousand times. I have saved innumerable innocent lives; others I have hurt, by carelessness or by necessity. There has been pain; more, sometimes, than I thought I could withstand. But I have not yet been beaten down. My life is not simple, but it has meaning. And I have my brothers." At this her gaze flicks glancingly over to Jake, and some indefinable hardness around her mouth softens. "But that is not what you asked. My answer, Leah, is this: had I been afforded a premonition of the hardships which would pave the course of my life, I would have chosen not to fight."

"But you don't regret it," says Leah.

"No," says Tadi, smiling sadly. "I do not."

"Can you give me any more solid information about what I would be getting into, if I decided to join you guys?" Leah asks.

"Not much," admits Tadi. "Your formal education will be disrupted, although not permanently. You will have to quit your job, but your material needs will be provided for. You won't be able to tell your parents everything, though they do know some of this already. To your friends, you will be allowed to say nothing. Only with those of us who know already can you be totally open."

That won't be a problem; Leah doesn't have any friends. The mysterious nomads James and Victoria pretty effectively dismantled Leah's small-but-stable support network, and she never got around to building herself a new one. All she has, now, is Jake. And...and Nahuel. Both of whom are already in the club.

"You will experience pain," continues Tadi. "With guidance, and training, you will learn to fight around it; you will learn, in time, not to mind it too much. But it will be there. You will be injured, and your injuries will heal, but they will still hurt. And there is a chance that you will die."

"Everyone has to, eventually," says Leah.

Tadi's lips twitch. "I suppose you have a point," she says.

"If I train with you," says Leah, "will the fever go away?"

"The fever will become constant," says Tadi. "Here." She reaches out, takes Leah's hand in hers, and presses it against the side of her smooth brown neck. Leah is surprised to feel that Tadi's temperature is very near her own. "But you will acclimate. You will notice it no more than you notice a steady 98.4, now."

"Just answer me this one thing. Is this...some sort of drug thing?"

Tadi smiles, which is not a particularly reassuring answer to that question. "Essentially, yes," she replies, but doesn't say more than that.

"I'm assuming that's why I've been hearing voices? I was drugged?"

Tadi and Jake glance at each other. "We'll get into that," says Tadi. "If you decide to join us."

"When do you need an answer?"

"You can have as long as you want," says Tadi gently. "You need never decide. But of course…" She trails off meaningfully.

"That would still be a choice," Leah finishes for her.

* * *

><p>Leah wanders outside. Tadi said she can take as long as she wants, but Leah's not so sure time will make this decision easier.<p>

She wants to believe this. Wants to believe that all of her feverish mood swings and angry outbursts and freaky spurts of strength have a concrete cause, and maybe even a cure. But she's also afraid of what this sleeping dog might do if she recklessly pokes it in the eye.

Finally she goes back inside. Tadi and Jake are sitting at the kitchen table, eating spaghetti out of a big stainless-steel mixing bowl, playing table football over steaming piles of pasta.

"You said I need to meet Bella for some...some sort of _test_, right? Which means I could still fail that test?"

"It's not that sort of a test," says Tadi. "There is no passing or failing. But yes, it is possible that you do not possess certain qualities necessary for this life. If that is the case, then no amount of training will prepare you for our ways, and you will come home, none the worse for wear."

"But at least I'll know."

"At least you will know," says Tadi.

"And there's only one way to find out?"

"Yes."

"Okay then," says Leah, taking a deep breath. "Let's go see Bella Swan."

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading!<strong>


	8. The Test

After Jake and Leah have driven for an hour (Tadi having left by her own means), Jake turns the car down a series of ever-narrowing dirt roads. Leah hasn't seen a house or even a proper road in fifteen minutes. Jake pulls onto a patch of grass and cuts the engine, but makes no move to exit the vehicle.

"So...what happens next?" Leah asks.

"Well," he answers, "you need to meet Bella face to face. She's been staying with the Cullens and it would be too much to try this in front of all of them, so we're gonna have a little rendezvous in the woods over there."

"Okay," she says. "So, should we take a hike, or...?"

"Not yet," says Jake. "Bella—" He is interrupted by his cell phone. He gives Leah the just a sec gesture, gets out of the car and starts pacing while he talks to whoever's on the phone.

Nahuel jogs up out of the woods and sits cross-legged on the ground. He picks a long blade of grass, positions it between his two thumbs, and whistles through it. The high-pitched whine it emits hurts Leah's ears.

Images of the upcoming test churn through her mind. Will she have to fight someone, to prove her prowess? She doesn't really know how to fight, beyond what she's picked up from her pissing-matches with Nahuel; suddenly, she wishes she'd fought him a lot more, picked up a few more pointers. Maybe she can pass on balls alone. Leah knows the hardest part of winning a fight is finding the willingness, deep down, to hurt another person. She can always, somehow, find the mettle to hurt Nahuel, but she's not sure if she'd ever be willing to go to town on anyone else. Or maybe it's more of a psychological thing; perhaps they will want to test her sanity, or her morality, or her intelligence. The only psychological tests she can conjure up in this stress-filled moment are too scary to contemplate. Leah gets out of the car and goes to stand with Jake, who has finished his phone call and is now chatting carelessly with Nahuel.

"So, are you going to tell me what's about to happen?" she asks Jake.

"I can't tell you," says Jake, "but just...remember that, whatever happens, you're safe, you'll be okay. Alright?"

"Okay." Leah leaves them and goes into the woods to pee and stretch and panic. Over the tinkle of her urine hitting the ground, she hears Jake and Nahuel arguing.

_"Come on, Jake. So what if we're wrong? It can't hurt to tell her what to expect."_

_"Tadi said not to,"_ answers Jake.

_"Leah's going to hate you for not telling her sooner."_

_"Maybe, maybe not,"_ Jake whispers. _"It might not be her, anyway. She's had a shit year, man. She might actually just be like, a normal human person who's dealing with a shitty period of life. If that's the case, we shouldn't burden her with it, and if it's not the case, the change is so fucking weird that knowing about it beforehand won't make any difference. No one told me about it, and honestly, if I'd known ahead of time I think it would have made it worse. It's better to just let instinct take over for the first few hours."_

_"You should still tell her."_

_"Tadi wants to...give her a choice."_

At this distance, barely able even to distinguish individual words, Leah can't read Jake's tone. But he spells it out for her a moment later.

_"We know someone is about to turn. It looks like it's probably Leah, but _Tadi's seen false alarms before. She's _cautious, and she doesn't want to get her hopes up or get carried away before we know. The only way to know for sure is to get Leah in the same room as a leech." _There's a small pause. _"I think Tadi's desperate for it to be Leah."_

_"How do you know?"_ Nahuel's voice is cautious.

_"I can just tell. She loves her already. But I think she's also hoping it isn't Leah, y'know?"_

_"Because she loves her already."_

_"Yeah."_ Jake sighs heavily.

_"So we just have to...what, wait and see?"_ asks Nahuel impatiently.

_"That's about the way of it."_

_"What outcome are you hoping for?"_ asks Nahuel.

But Leah doesn't hear Jake's answer.

* * *

><p>Leah rejoins Jake and Nahuel after she's systematically voided first her bladder and then her bowels and then her breakfast. Her hands are shaking. This situation has all the earmarks of not being a totally contrived practical joke, which makes it scarier.<p>

Finally, the three of them hike some distance to a smallish clearing where Tadi is waiting with a hot shirtless Asian dude.

"Leah," says Tadi, "this is Jae. He is a relative of Jake's. He'll help keep an eye on things."

Leah numbly shakes Jae's proffered hand. The air out here reeks like an apocalyptic flower shop. Leah feels her throat close up. Her skin breaks out in a hot-and-cold sweat. She wishes she could still be in her dream-state from the previous night. She could absorb unrealities, then. Right now she can't absorb anything. Every one of Leah's five senses is humming like a plucked string, plus a few senses she neither recognizes nor comprehends. She hears heartbeats and birds and insects and people breathing and a high-pitched, irregular drip-and-hiss from Jake's car, a hundred yards behind her. She licks her lips and almost gags; she can _taste_ the rotting-flower smell of the air. Her palms are swampy. She's not sure if it's just nerves from all this weird secretive cult stuff, or if it's the copious amounts of drugs she suspects she's been on for months now, or if it's something else altogether. What she _does_ know is that she suddenly wants to punch through a tree. Her hands curl into fists and her chest feels tight. She can hear and even smell strange bodies, hidden from view to her right and left. Sometimes, she thinks they sound human. Sometimes not.

Leah's chest is starting to hurt.

She is about to just collapse into a self-protective huddle when someone else walks up, moving with a sort of odd, slinky grace.

A very pale brown-haired girl wearing an expression of acute concentration. The girl is Bella Swan, but grown up into a super-hottie. Leah is about to pull herself together to greet the newcomer when the full stench hits her: thousands of rotting flowers, a hundredweight of spoiled fruit, death and decay and a wedding bouquet.

The gut-clenching fumes are falling off Bella in waves. Leah keels over, retching, sick and humiliated in front of all these strangers, her skin so hot it's visibly steaming in the cool air. She wants to claw her own flesh off. She wants to burst out of her body, she can feel every bone and every blood cell and every drop of bile trying to expand inside her, and she clenches her jaw and bites her cheeks and flexes every muscle she can think of in an effort to hold herself in, stay in one piece. She wants to fly apart. She _needs_ to fly apart.

"Let it happen," urges Tadi in a voice Leah is desperate to obey. "Just let it happen. We will help you."

"Let _what_ happen?" Leah grunts, her bowels twisting painfully. Bella steps forward and Leah gets another swallow of that hellish miasma. She hunches over and vomits a glob of viscous bile onto Nahuel's bare feet. Automatically he pulls her hair loosely out of the way and rests one hand reassuringly on the back of her neck just as he did when checking her for fever, only two nights ago.

"Leah, _let yourself change_," Tadi says, her voice growing imperious, and Leah wants to, she wants to obey, she is sure she can find a way to obey, but it feels so terrible. She does not want this. She does not want this unspeakable soul-jarring pain to deepen, and she knows that it will if she cannot control it _now_. Nahuel's cool familiar touch centers Leah just enough to reclaim her body, to stumble away from that awful smell, away from this nightmare, away from all these people with all their mysteries, just _away_.

"Why isn't it working?" asks Bella in a gorgeous, uncertain alto, just before Leah turns tail and runs.

* * *

><p>The voices follow her all the way back up the dirt road, louder than they've ever been.<p>

_—Leah, if you're—answer if you—can you hear me?—it wasn't supposed to be like—should have been different—I was wrong, it wasn't her—it wasn't her—it was never her—_

There's more, too, not just voices: every time Leah blinks she sees things that aren't there. Passing trees, the same road she's running on but from a different vantage point, the faces of Bella and the toddler and Tadi. She even sees herself, once, running doggedly, glimpsed through trees. She spins around at this, looking for whoever's looking at her, and for a second she thinks she sees a flicker of light reflected from faraway animal eyes, but then the eyes vanish and the vision of herself vanishes too.

And she keeps running.

* * *

><p>Leah has run herself ragged long before she stops. Her heart is pounding fit to burst but it feels more like a normal, ran-too-much kind of pounding and less like an imminent cardiac explosion. She is breathless and drenched in sweat. She finally just collapses in the middle of a dirt road. There are no cars or houses for miles, but insects buzz in the grass nearby.<p>

Almost as soon as she's down, she hears Jake frantically calling her name. She groans, unbelieving, furious beyond reckoning that she was followed so damn easily.

"Leah, hey, wake up," Jake is saying, shaking her shoulder urgently.

"I'm not asleep," she mutters, cracking one eye open to peer at him malevolently. He seems to have shed most of the clothes he was wearing earlier, everything but his boxers. He kept pace with her this whole way and he wasn't even wearing _shoes?_ God, Nahuel was right, she's weak, everyone and their grandmother is stronger than her.

"Fuck off," she says eloquently.

"Leah, I'm so sorry. We really thought that would work…"

"What were you expecting to happen?" Leah says, struggling to sit up. She's so tired. God, she's just so tired. Not from the run, exactly, but from everything, all of it, from the minute Aunt Linda told her Emily was dead to the minute she collapsed trying to run away from her problems.

"It doesn't matter anymore," says Jake. "_Something_ obviously happened, but not...not enough."

"So I failed the test." Why does that thought hurt so much?

"Believe me," says Jake earnestly, "it's not really a test you want to pass. I mean, you heard what Tadi said. If she had a choice… Leah, I'm sorry. I thought I knew what was going on with you, but I was wrong. I'm so sorry. Shit, I just fucked everything up. It would have been better if I'd never come b—"

"Don't you _dare_ say that," interrupts Leah, trying to stay angry so she doesn't get sad. "Don't even think that. I needed you, Jake. You shouldn't have left me. I don't care that you're in a gang. I seriously don't. Be in a gang, be in ten gangs! But you need to still be in my gang, do you understand?"

"I know," he says, and even though she's not making a lick of sense she knows he does understand, "I know, and I always will be, Leah, I promise—"

"You tried to replace me," she accuses. "You can't just replace me with Nahuel."

"Leah, you were here first. I would never replace you," he insists. "Nahuel's my guy, but it's not like that makes you stop being family."

"That's what it felt like."

"I know you don't like him. I should never have forced you two to live in close quarters like that. It was selfish of me."

"Well," she says, "which one of us has to go?"

Jake elbows her, but kindly. "Don't be a dumbass," he says, "of course you can stay as long as you want to."

"I'm not trying to be a wedge here," she says, "but he just... Like, you know what he said to me last night?"

"What'd he say?"

"He told me I'm turning into a werewolf. Like, oh, hardy fucking har, asshole, yes, I get it, I'm a woman, it must just be _that time of the month_."

"Okay, and I will totally kick his ass for that," says Jake. "That was out of line."

"Damn right it was." So why'd she fuck him two seconds later?

Jake helps Leah to her feet. "We're already planning to leave in a couple days. Do you want me to ask him to leave sooner than that?"

Leah sighs heavily. "No," she says. "He's fine. I like Nahuel, I honestly do. I'm glad you have him. And you know what, he's been here for me, no matter how fucked up I get, and you—" She stops. Jake looks miserable.

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry, Lee. I let you down."

"Just please don't leave again. I know you're planning on going somewhere with Nahuel. I know I have no right to ask you to stay. But I'm asking, Jake. Stay. Please."

Jake is quiet so long she is sure he's going to say no. But he doesn't.

"I owe you that much," he says at last. "If Nahuel finds out he really needs me with him, I can always join him later. I'll stay."

"Promise?"

"I promise, Lee."

* * *

><p>That evening, after Leah's sat in the bathtub listening to self-pitying music for four hours straight, Jake knocks on her door and tells her Tadi's here to talk. To her surprise, Leah finds that in spite of everything she really wants to see Tadi again, so she opens her bedroom door.<p>

"How are you feeling, Leah?" asks Tadi kindly, sitting on the bed. Leah can feel the woman's warmth on her legs, even through the blankets she wrapped herself in for comfort.

"Not great," she admits. "So...can you tell me anything, now? Is it drugs? Do I need to see a doctor?"

"Couldn't hurt," says Tadi. "I can't be sure, but I'm beginning to put together the pieces. I've heard that many of your symptoms have been connected to Nahuel. Is this so?"

Leah nods.

"I get all weird when he's around. At first I thought I was just crazy, but now…"

"I understand. Nahuel was one of Joham's...er, experiments." Leah feels the bile rise in her gullet at the word. Not for the first time, she wishes she could have a few minutes alone in a room with Nahuel's dad. "One result of that experiment is that Nahuel now emits specific pheromones which act on certain people much like a drug. Very few would respond to him that way; in fact, we did not realize that he could cause this response at all. But it seems that he can, and that you are one of the few who are vulnerable to it. Bella produces a far more potent version of that chemical, which is why you responded to it so much more strongly. If you stay away from Bella and Nahuel and other people like them, the symptoms should fade away soon enough. You will be as you were."

"So he's been poisoning me," says Leah dully.

"In a way, yes."

"Is he poisoning you?"

"No. That is to say...I am sensitive to him and others like him, but, through my training, I rarely suffer from the side effects which are still so new to you."

Leah thinks back on Bella and her goddamn repulsive miasma, and wonders just what the hell that encounter was supposed to prove. "I guess I'm not what you thought I was."

"Whatever you are," says Tadi firmly, "you're family. Remember that. And I do think there is more here to know. You were clearly affected by this pheromone; however, I expected it to have a much more marked effect on you. I expected it to affect you the way it affects me, or Jake."

"And what effect would that be?" asks Leah carefully. "Am I allowed to know?"

"It's a change that happens, makes us good fighters. It makes us stronger and more focused, faster, more sensitive to our surroundings. You may be strong, and you may be a competent fighter; but you could never hope to go up against someone like Joham, and live. Not as you are. You've changed, but not enough. The change I expected to see did not happen."

"So I didn't pass."

Tadi smiles, and her smile is deeply sad and ecstatically relieved, both at once. Then she says, after a thoughtful pause, "When the change first begins to affect us, it takes us with such force that we are trapped by it, imprisoned by our bodies' natural response to these chemicals. We cannot comprehend it or make sense of it; we certainly cannot control it, but instead must wait for control to grow within us, slowly and painfully. I do not think it is such a tragedy that you are spared that struggle."

* * *

><p>Nahuel will be gone soon, and Leah will be as she was before. She has to keep telling herself that she wants this. She remembers the way she felt in that clearing, her organs and tissues and cells popping and bursting inside her, while her brain peeled away from her body like paint off an old door. She never wants to feel that way again. And she never has to—as long as she steers clear of Nahuel and the Cullens for the rest of her life.<p>

But is that what she wants, really? Tadi had said there would be pain, and Leah had truly believed she knew what that meant. Whatever happened in that clearing was not _pain_. Pain is stubbing a toe. Pain is a migraine, or period cramps, or mono, or fucking childbirth. Pain is losing Emily, losing Sam, losing Uncle Bill.

No, what happened in the woods was not pain. It was something else, something worse. Pain happens to the body, the mind. Whatever was happening to Leah happened to her very soul, her whole sense of _self_, and _existence_, and _being_. Leah can't even bring herself to remember it, for fear that the the mere memory of that hellish wind will finish what it started this morning, will tear her away from herself forever. Tadi said that it could be managed, with training. But Leah knows with absolute certainty that she will never seek out that soul-searing sensation again. She is not strong enough by half.

* * *

><p>Nahuel and Jake and Leah hang out in the living room, on the night before Nahuel leaves without Jake. Then Jake leaves the room to use the toilet.<p>

"Do you hate me?" is the first thing Nahuel says, so quietly Leah almost doesn't hear.

"No," she says. "But I can't be normal and have you too."

Nahuel crosses the room to sit with her on the couch. "Why should normal hold such appeal? You are not normal, Leah. Let no man tell you that lie."

Why does he have to say things like that, why, why?

"I just wanna be okay," she says, pleading, not answering.

"What does that even mean?" he says bitterly.

"God, Nahuel, what do you care? You've literally never known me as a normal person. I used to be totally fine. I honestly did. And I was happy, I was in school, I was getting married—I spent twenty years as that person and like two months as _this_ ridiculous fuck-up."

"The fuck-up is the one I know," says Nahuel. "I like you fucked up."

Leah crosses her arms and blesses him with a uniquely poignant glare.

"I mean, you're not as fucked up as you think," he corrects. "I've met worse."

"Right now I'm strapped to a roller coaster from which there is no escape."

"That sounds awesome. You should stay on it."

"What's your point, Nahuel? What are you really asking me?"

Nahuel stares at his lap. "You want everything to go back to normal. I have no right to tell you not to want that." He looks up and holds her gaze. "But you should not want that. It is beneath you."

"You've been poisoning me," she reminds him. "With your pheromones, or whatever. Did you know that would happen?"

"I did not know," he says solemnly. "I swear I did not know that I could do this to a person. It has never happened before, in my whole lifetime. But now that it has happened—do you not see how much power you could wield? Do not turn away from it, Leah. Something started to happen to you, and you pushed it away, and now they're all saying we were wrong about you. I know Tadi thinks that is the end of it. She believes no one can control it in the beginning, just because no one ever has; that you didn't change because you _couldn't_. But you _can_, Leah, I know you can. You just have to stop fighting it."

Leah's mind, unbidden, recalls the meeting with Bella. She swallows back a mouthful of vomit, just remembering. "No," she says, "I can't. I couldn't. I couldn't control it. All I could do was run away."

"But don't you see that you _were_—" he starts to say, but Leah cuts him off with a look.

"I need this day to be over," she says with forced patience. "Good night, Nahuel."

* * *

><p>She tosses and turns for hours. Finally, she gets up from her bed and goes to the door. Nahuel is standing on the other side of her bedroom door, his fist raised to knock, even as she turns the knob. She pulls him inside and they are on each other before the door has swung closed. She can't get him out of his clothes fast enough. They struggle to be quiet.<p>

Leah's bed has noisy rusty springs, so they fuck on the floor. Then on the busted old armchair. Then, Nahuel takes Leah from behind while she leans out the window and lets the wind adore her tits. He kisses every part of her he can find, repeatedly, without tiring. Leah touches him with reverence and appreciation. Every part of him is flawlessly beautiful, every plane of his small body flowing fluidly into the next, every joint exquisitely articulated, every muscle lean and compact. She breathes in his various scents, from the dusty sweetness of his hair to the heady pheromonal reek under his arms to the calm grass-and-earth smell of his feet. In almost no time his mouth and hands and groin smell like her. She sucks her own fluids off his cock with relish.

They don't talk much. When they eventually fall still from exhaustion, Nahuel reaches up and drags a number of quilts off Leah's bed, and they roll up in them until their hard, sharp bits are sufficiently protected from the wooden floor.

They do not succeed in falling asleep.

Leah has to get up at seven for work, and she showers morosely, wanting powerfully to keep the parts of Nahuel that she loves without having to hang on to the parts she hates. What would he be, if she could shave away the elements that persistently cause her distress? Which aspect of him makes her feverish and hostile? Is it related to the part which learned her body with such enthusiasm that already his touches feel perfectly suited to her needs? Can she have him without the voices, without the rage? Does she even want him without the rage? Is there some antidote to his..._condition?_ Joham did this to his son; could he undo it? A flutter of excitement drifts through her at the thought that there might be a cure for Nahuel and his toxic pheromones. If there were a cure, and if Joham could be compelled to give it up…

This might not have to be a permanent farewell.

Leah finishes her shower quickly, her body heated and needy. She towels her hair dry, wraps herself in a towel, and returns to her room. She has time for one more. Just one more fuck before she leaves for work and he leaves to see his twisted family. And she will force herself to say things that are not easy to say, like _thank you_ and _good luck_ and _I will help you if I can_.

But he's not in her room anymore. He's not in his room. Leah dresses in an increasing state of unease and goes downstairs to find Jake eating a bowl of cereal.

"He went out," he says before she can utter a word. "What did you do, Lee?" He looks up at her not with dislike or disapproval, but with dismay. "He tore out of here and wouldn't say a thing to me. He never doesn't talk to me. As long as I've known him. What happened?"

"I don't know," she says. "I never know."

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading and reviewing!<strong>


	9. Family Gathering

Leah falls asleep twice at work. Once on her fifteen-minute break, once behind the cash register when no one is in the store. Both times she jerks awake in a panic, but no one notices. She almost falls asleep behind the wheel on her way home, but makes it without incident. Jake is gone and Nahuel is gone and Nahuel's room is empty, cleaned out, the bed already stripped. She rolls up in the blankets they shared on the floor last night, and sleeps like a baby.

A week after that terrible night in the woods, Leah's temperature reads a consistent 98.4, and she hears no more voices.

After a few weeks, she is feeling pretty much completely normal, on a day-to-day basis. She only feels the usual amount of rage: when someone cuts her off on the road, for example, or when customers are assholes. She feels the way she felt a year and a half ago. It's a miracle. She's goddam _cured_.

One day while Leah is napping on the couch she notices a lump in the cushions. She roots around in a crack and withdraws _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_. She doesn't read Portuguese any more than she reads ancient Greek, but she hangs onto it anyway, to return to Nahuel next time she sees him, assuming such a day ever comes. She flips through it a few times, interested in the things he's scrawled in the margins. Quotes and commentary, mostly in Portuguese but sometimes in English. His sister Jennifer's phone number. A long list of other books he wants to read.

March passes without further incident. Then April. Tadi comes to the house sometimes, along with Jae and another big guy called Ard, and no one ever mentions Nahuel or drug cartels or Bella Swan in her presence.

* * *

><p>By mid-May Leah has reclaimed as much normalcy as she is ever likely to. Her mom and dad remark on it, happy for her. She sees them every weekend. She drives up to visit Seth a few times. She is like the Leah Clearwater of yore, pretty and smart and capable and no more temperamental than your average young woman of twenty-one. There is only one difference: before, depressed, she did not believe she could ever be happy again, did not think that there was a happiness out there with her name on it. Now she knows it's possible, but that it comes only at the vicious price of her sanity. She has smooth sailing all before her. Not a cloud on the horizon. She wouldn't mind a <em>little<em> squall, now and then.

Leah comes home from her last day of school to find Jake in the final stages of packing a bag.

"Going somewhere?" she says. Jake nods, but he doesn't look guilty about neglecting to tell her, which means something is really wrong, really unexpectedly. The pit of Leah's stomach turns to iron. "What is it?" she says.

"I haven't heard from Nahuel in five days," he answers.

"Is that not good?" She knows it's not good from the way Jake's face is set and the way her guts are now wrought and solid and heavy.

"It's not good," he says. "We talk every day. Sometimes we miss a day, if we're busy. We at least text. God, this is awful. Fuck. If something happened to him—"

_Feels pretty shitty not knowing, doesn't it?_ Leah thinks, but she is far from callous enough to say this aloud. Instead she says, "Do you know where he is?"

"Last I checked, he was in Quebec. No idea which part. I'm going to the Cullens' right now. We leave tonight. We have some friends who can help us. Shit. I'd feel it if something were really wrong. Wouldn't I? Wouldn't I feel that?" He no longer seems to be addressing Leah.

Leah gets Nahuel's cell phone number from Jake as well as a promise that he will tell her if anything turns up. Then she hugs him and waves him off, and sits on the couch and stares at her hands for fifteen minutes. She forces herself to eat some dinner. Just because Jake hasn't heard from Nahuel in five days doesn't automatically mean something is wrong. Maybe Nahuel's just busy.

Leah watches some TV and tries hard to sleep. She calls Nahuel a few times, but it goes straight to voicemail. She's never heard his mellifluous voice reduced to electronic particles in a phone. It's a strange sensation that leaves her feeling flat.

She thinks about the last time she saw Nahuel. He could have spent the night talking to Jake; it would not be a first. But instead he chose to spend it with her. Why? What did he need that only she could provide? What did he need her to distract him from?The only other time she ever saw him like that—tired, exhausted, not by activity but by some weight on his mind—was when he came back the first time, after visiting his family.

He's afraid of his father, the man who almost killed him at least once. Has the unworthy shitstain Joham gotten his claws into Nahuel at last? Has he finally succeeded where he failed before?

At three in the morning Leah bolts upright, her temples throbbing. She falls out of bed and stumbles over to her dresser, roots around in her sock drawer and pulls out _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_. She flips through it until she finds the page with Jennifer's number scrawled on it, and dials that number with shaking fingers. She's too paranoid to wait for a proper hour for making calls. She's not really even thinking about that.

It rings forever. It does not go to voicemail. Leah sits on her bed and waits, her head drooping, her fingers cold and her eyes heavy.

A young woman's voice jerks Leah out of her sleepy stupor after about a hundred rings.

_"Who is this?"_

"Hello?" says Leah. "This is a friend of Nahuel's, I was just—"

_"What's your name?"_

"Um, Leah Clearwater. Am I talking to Jennifer?"

_"Leah,"_ repeats Jennifer. _"Leah. Hm."_

"Yes, and I was wondering if—"

_"Oh, I remember,"_ says Jennifer. _"Leah. Jacob's cousin. I've heard of you. What do you want, Leah?"_

"Well, Jake hasn't heard from Nahuel in a while, and last time I saw him he was acting sort of weird, and I just wanted to check that everything was okay. I mean, if you've seen him recently. It's been bugging me, so I figured I'd just call and find out for sure. I'm sorry if I woke you up." It takes a monstrous effort not to sound like a crazy lady right now. Why in god's name did she call at three in the morning? Could she not wait?

The answer, of course, is _no._

_"You did not wake me,"_ says Jennifer. _"Unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't really put your mind at ease. I haven't seen my brother in a while. Did he give you this number?"_

"I found it in a book."

_"Which book?"_

"Uh, _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_."

There is a stretched-out silence on the other end.

Then, Jennifer says, _"He left Memórias?" _Warily, probingly, as if suspecting foul play.

"Yes."

"Prove it."

"Prove it?" Is this chick for real?

"Yes. Or I will hang up on you immediately."

"Okay, hang on a sec," says Leah. She flips through the book and lands on a page thickly scrawled with Nahuel's sloppy cursive. It takes her a moment to decipher his writing, but eventually, cringing at her own poor pronunciation, she reads, "'Meu pai conseguiu dar-me sua maldição. Não consegui dar o meu próprio filho a minha maldição. Então, quem é o sucesso e quem é a falha?' Does that ring any bells?"

_"Several thousand bells, yes,"_ says Jennifer. _"I suspect that you are right, and that Nahuel is not a safe man. What do you want me to do about it?"_

"I don't know. Can you give me a hint as to where I might reach him?"

_"A hint?"_

"A hint, a clue, a tip, anything," says Leah impatiently. "Can you tell me where he _might_ be? Can you find a way to reach him? He's not answering his cell phone."

_"He might be anywhere on earth,"_ says Jennifer unhelpfully.

Leah refrains, with difficulty, from throwing her phone at a wall.

_"I can guess at where he is, the idiot."_

"Can you tell me?"

_"No. Absolutely not. That would get me into a lot of trouble, and if he is where I think he is, giving you directions would get him into even more trouble."_ Leah bites down on her own fist to keep from swearing a blue streak into the phone. So Jake was right, Nahuel's in danger. And it almost certainly has something to do with his dad._ "I can show you, though. But you'll have to come to me." _That's something. The semester just ended. Leah can call off work for a few days.

"I can do that. Where are you?"

_"Ohio."_

Jesus. "All right. I can do that."

_"I'll meet you part-way. I'll be in Minneapolis in twenty-four hours. Call me when you get in. If you fail to show up, I will block your number from my phone."_

"Yes, all right," says Leah. "Will I need a car when I get there?"

_"No. Better to take mine. I'll meet you at the airport."_ Leah grunts assent.

_"And bring your passport,"_ Jennifer adds before hanging up.

This has all the makings of an unbelievably stupid idea.

* * *

><p>Leah spends the next morning in a dream. Specifically, in a recurring dream that has plagued her since childhood. The dream is always the same: for some unexplained and usually unimportant reason, she has found herself in a state of high emergency, and she needs to decide what items to pack to see her safe in an unknown future. Sometimes in the dream she finds herself reaching for canned food and bottles of water, first-aid supplies, cold-weather clothes. Sometimes it's cash, jewelry and any valuables she can sell or barter. Sometimes it's weapons and protective coverings. But the feel of the dream is always the same: <em>This is an emergency. You are unprepared. What now?<em>

Leah empties out her purse and re-packs it with her cell phone, her cell phone charger, a notebook and writing implements, six clean handkerchiefs, a bottle of water, a metal nail file. Her passport; her wallet, containing a fair amount of cash, her I.D., her debit card, a miniature metal nail file. She books the cheapest flight she can find on short notice; the purchase almost halves her checking account. If Nahuel turns out to be bumming around Toronto getting stoned or something, she will think nothing of taking the cost of the plane ticket out of him in blood. But she knows, deep down, that that won't be what she finds.

She sleeps a little on the plane, then flips through the in-flight magazine, and frets almost incessantly. When she lands, she shoots Jennifer a text, and is told to go out to the passenger loading zone, where Jennifer is already waiting.

Leah heads for the red Corvette idling in the line of lesser cars; the passenger side door pops open as she approaches. She tosses her overnight bag into the backseat and climbs in, and is immediately struck by how very losely Jennifer resembles her brother. Sure, her features are nothing like his, her skin is austerely pale, her eyes a vivid purplish-blue, her hair a flowing waterfall of silky chestnut. Nevertheless, she can only be Nahuel's sister. Leah knows this, without the slightest doubt, because the minute she sees the girl, she feels feverish, furious, and prepared to commit motherfucking homicide.

_Definitely_ Nahuel's sister.

"Thanks for doing this," she says through gritted teeth. Jennifer looks her up and down, and does not convey any reaction beyond a total failure to be impressed at what she sees.

"Did you bring the book?" Her voice is even prettier in person. Everything about her is perfect-looking and memorable. God, this is going to be a fucking trial. What the hell is Leah even doing in Minneapolis? This Jennifer character looks like she could definitely cut a bitch. Leah will end up in a ditch and she has only herself to blame. If only she could have some assurance that Nahuel is safe, before she is murdered by his creepy doll of a sister. "The book?" Jennifer says again, not at all graciously.

Leah roots around in her purse and pulls out _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_, but she doesn't hand it over. "It's here, I'm here," she says. "Have you heard anything?"

Jennifer takes a tiny sip of coffee and sits back. "No," she says. Leah slumps into her seat. She just wants _one little hint_. Is that so much to ask for?

"You look tired," she says. "Have some food if you're hungry; there are protein bars in the glove compartment. I'd rather not stop to eat. We've got a long way to go." She squeals out of the line of cars and onto the road.

They drive through much of the rest of the night, crossing into Canada after a few hours. They don't speak, and Leah doesn't dare fall asleep, because she doesn't want to lose track of where she is. Finally, as the sun is rising to their right, Jennifer takes an exit for Winnipeg. Finally, they pull into the lot of a downtown hotel which Leah can most certainly not afford. She is trying to say this through yawns the whole time Jennifer is paying for a suite of rooms, but her only response is a cutting glare of annoyance.

Just before falling asleep, in the second of two bedrooms, Leah texts Jake to let him know that she is in Winnipeg, with Nahuel's sister. Then she passes out for ten hours.

* * *

><p>Leah is having a dream about being beaten over the head by a two-by-four. It's a lifelike experience; she can really hear the hard blows to her skull. They are growing louder.<p>

She jolts awake, becoming groggily aware that the sound that woke her was Jennifer knocking on her door.

"Hurry up," she commands. "We're leaving in fifteen minutes."

Leah doesn't have time to shower, but she brushes her teeth and refreshes her deodorant, grabs her purse and follows Jennifer downstairs. The symptoms of being around Joham's offspring (Leah tries hard not to think the word _experiments_) have had time to ripen while Leah slept. As soon as she slides into Jennifer's car, her temperature starts to fritz. Every time Jennifer gives her the side-eye and prissily sniffs, Leah has to force her fists to unclench.

The fever and its ever-present shadow, irrational aggression, pound away at Leah's head all day, though there are blessedly no voices. She finds herself not so much minding how stupid and pointless this impromptu road trip is. She's just hoping she'll have a chance to fight someone, and soon. What is it about this family? Nahuel, at least, had a fan-fucking-tastic personality. Leah sees that now. He was cool and smart and genuine. His sister has the personality of a bacterium lining a cat's asshole. The irrational anger they inspire might be identical, but Nahuel also inspired humor and introspection and, obviously, lust. Jennifer just inspires a headache.

An hour or so north of Winnipeg, Leah goes to check her phone for possible texts from Jake, only to realize she must have left it in her hotel room, although she could have sworn it was safely tucked into the front pocket of her purse. This is fucking perfect. God, she's gonna be murdered out here by a touchy Barbie doll with an axe to grind. Shit, this is a bad idea. She's in fucking Manitoba, for god's sake.

"So, what did that quote mean?" Leah asks once, partly to break the silence and partly because she really wants to know. "The one in the book?"

"Show it to me," orders Jennifer. Leah complies.

Jennifer skims Nahuel's scrawl. "It means, more or less, 'My father succeeded in giving me his curse. I failed to give my own son my curse. So, who is the success and who is the failure?'"

"Huh," says Leah. "What's it from?"

"What do you mean, what's it from? It's not from anything. Nahuel's just prone to theatrics. He probably wrote that after his kid died."

Leah goes cold.

"Nahuel has a child?" she asks quietly.

"Not anymore," says Jennifer. "Weren't you listening? He died a long time ago."

Leah's chest feels tight.

"I didn't know that," she says.

"Well, he doesn't tend to lead with that information," says Jennifer. "It pretty much ruins him, every time. From what I hear, it doesn't get any easier. That's why _I'm_ never having kids. You'd think after all this time he'd learn, but he never does."

"How many children has he lost?" Leah asks, her heart twisting in her chest. So this is what's been chasing him. This is why Jake looks after Nahuel as fastidiously as a nanny. Poor fucker. She wishes she'd known this, before.

"God, who knows?" says Jennifer, inappropriately cheerfully. Gossiping about her brother seems to have galvanized her.

"What happened to them all?"

Jennifer rolls her eyes. "Um, they died?"

"Yes, but—" Leah shuts her mouth. She shouldn't pry. The very, _very_ least she can do is not pry. "Never mind," she says. She leans back in her seat and watches the flat landscape roll by, and before long she has dozed uneasily off.

* * *

><p>Leah is awake and hungry and fighting a losing battle with her bladder before they finally arrive wherever they're going. It's out in the middle of nowhere, but other than that fact this destination is unremarkable: there is a small, plain house set back from a small, plain road. House, road, landscape and sky are all a weathered gray. Jennifer pulls up onto the dead lawn and parks.<p>

"Well," she says, turning to Leah. "Here we are."

"This is where Nahuel is?"

"I don't know," says Jennifer impatiently, "why don't you go find out? Do I have to do everything for you?"

Leah gets out of the car and stretches, stands there for a few moments contemplating what might be on the other side of that front door, and then trudges up the front steps. She works herself up to it, and knocks. For a while no one answers, though she hears steps and voices from inside, and a repetitive low moan.

Finally the door is opened by another of Nahuel's sisters, this one even paler than Jennifer, with white-blonde hair.

"Is this the whore?" she snaps at Jennifer, regarding Leah through narrowed ice-blue eyes.

Jennifer says, almost deferentially, "This is Leah. What news, sister?"

"Bring her." Serena spins on her heel and retreats into the house.

Jennifer takes a firm hold of Leah and begins to push her ahead into the house, and Leah realizes with a leaden feeling in the pit of her stomach that this is it, she's been set up, here comes the part where she gets her ass murdered for sticking her nose where it doesn't belong. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She jerks away from Jennifer and sprints for the car, but Jennifer gets there first and almost breaks Leah's wrist for her trouble. Leah begins swearing and shrieking, hoping that there is someone in this wide empty landscape who might hear, but it's too late, Jennifer manhandles her into the house and the door is locked behind her. The fact that at no point does Jennifer ever pretend to reassure her is all the confirmation Leah needs: This was a mistake, probably the last one she will ever have the opportunity to make.

Serena leads the way through the house; Jennifer follows, alternately carrying and dragging her hostage. Leah does not waste energy making noise anymore, and just concentrates on wriggling free of Jennifer's vicelike grip. She almost succeeds once, but there's nowhere for her to go before Jennifer reclaims her, and soon Leah is shoved into a small bedroom at the back of the house. The air is stifling in this windowless room; it smells pungently of blood and urine, although everything looks to be more or less clean on the surface. There is a small metal-frame bed surrounded by a series of IV stands and medical implements. On the bed, shivering in spite of the space heater next to her, lies a woman who is so thin that the lines of her skull are clearly visible through the flesh of her face. She looks deathly ill, her skin waxy and sallow, her bones protruding sharply. Another woman kneels beside the sick lady, singing indistinctly, holding her hand. The one singing is almost certainly another sister, dark-skinned with a broad, flat face and black eyes. Like her sisters and brother, she is inhumanly beautiful.

"She's really here," she says, pausing in her crooning to peer over at Leah. Her low, throaty voice expresses an uncanny mixture of regret and approval.

"She is as foolish as our unfortunate brother," says Jennifer dismissively.

"It is not always foolish to love," says the dark one meekly. Serena grabs her by the arm and drags her roughly from the room. Leah is not surprised to hear the bedroom door lock from the other side, trapping her in here with the sick lady. Her first move is to see if the door can be broken open, but the lock is too secure even for her exceptional strength. There are no windows in this room, and the only air vent is much too small to use as an escape route. Leah settles on the floor with her ear pressed up against the door. The three sisters are holding a private conference in whispers in the next room, but Leah's hearing is as good now as it was when Nahuel was living with her, and she can hear them if she concentrates.

"Thank goodness at least one thing has worked in our favor," Serena is saying. "Nahuel will come for her, I think. He will trade us the infant for his whore. She has _Memórias_. He left it with her."

"It sounded more like he forgot it at her house," says Jennifer. "Maybe she doesn't mean as much to him as you think, Serena. She didn't even know about his children."

"You know how he feels about that wretched book," Serena says. "Even if he left it accidentally, the fact that he left it where she could find it is surely significant. And she is the dog's cousin. No, Nahuel will come for her. And she is the only card we have left to play. Thank our little genius May for that."

May must be the third sister, the one who was tending to the sick woman. "Perhaps Nahuel will be unwilling to trade for her," she says, almost hopefully.

"Of course he'll trade," says Jennifer. "If you'd just done your work, May, we wouldn't be in this bind at all. You had one job, for christ's sake! Whatever possessed you to trust him alone with the infant? Why was he even here in the first place? You know these things only upset him."

"Ugh, remember how he was when Jen was born?" says Serena. "You should have turned him away. If you were too spineless for that, you should at least have called upon me or Father to dispose of him."

"He told me that the mother can be saved," says May weakly. "I would have turned him away, I swear I would. But he told me that he has learned of a way to keep the mother alive. You know Father is interested in understanding why the conception succeeds in some and not others. Think of how much he can learn, if even one mother survives the birth—!"

"Don't pretend to have been thinking of what Father wants," says Serena viciously. "He is not interested in hypothetical offspring. If we do not get the child back, she will grow up wrong, as Nahuel did. You've grown attached to the stupid sow, May, admit it. You wanted her to live because you think she's your _friend_. You let your feelings cloud your judgment, and now Nahuel has taken the child and fled. You have shamed this whole family by your laziness and inattention."

"Lay off, Serena, so what if May's grown attached?" says Jennifer. "She makes a good point. The only blessing in this dreadful ordeal is that Chu-Hua lives; has she not proven her usefulness? I can think of little else that will soften Father's mood. I assume he knows of the kidnapping?"

"Of course," says Serena. "May called me after Nahuel took the infant and ran. She _should_ have informed Father herself, but that would require guts, which we all know Maysun lacks—don't you, dear? Father is searching for Nahuel and the baby. He will join us here when he is ready. Let us pray that he has the child with him, and we can put an end to this madness."

Leah has been listening to all of this quietly, trying to remain calm, trying to grasp what is happening. Nahuel's description of his dad's philandering might have been just a _bit_ euphemistic, she now sees. Because right now it is sounding like he actually kidnaps and impregnates woman and then leaves them to _literally fucking die_. Leah's throat feels close and swollen. She wants to cry and rage and fight. After a whole day stuck in the car with Jennifer, and now this nuclear fuck-upery, she is feeling about as belligerent as she's ever been, but she also knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, unlike Nahuel, these three sisters will not bother to fight fair. She wants to grab that poor skin-and-bones woman on the bed and break down the bedroom door and get the hell away from here; but of course, that is not an option. Failing that, she wants to claw the unbearable Serena's eyes out and then shove them down her throat till she asphyxiates. And she thought _Jennifer_ was bad. Serena makes Jennifer look like an angel of compassion. And both of them are apparently down for taking hostages. Leah is ashamed of how easily she fell into Jennifer's trap. She's been played. She is trapped, and she has no doubt that these women or their monstrous father will kill her the minute they cease to find her useful.

How in god's name did a family like this produce a man like Nahuel?

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading and reviewing, and have a nice winter holiday (if you celebrate such things)!<strong>


	10. Hostage Negotiation

The three sisters talk for a little while more, but they move further from the bedroom and Leah can no longer follow their conversation. She goes through her purse, hoping against hope there might be something useful in there. A phone would be really great about now.

But of course, Jennifer must have gone through it while Leah was napping in the car; she notices that the few items which might have helped her, namely some pens and a metal nail file, are mysteriously missing. Her purse contains Altoids, tampons and pads, a few stubby pencils, some scrap paper, receipts, her wallet, Chapstick, some grubby ancient makeup she nevers uses, and _Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas_. The three sisters apparently think that her possession of this book proves something about her relationship with Nahuel. What was it Serena called her? Oh, yes. His whore. Never mind that she hasn't seen Nahuel in ages, or that they never had anything like a formal relationship. Leah doesn't suppose there's any way she can convince her captors of that.

All the same, whatever he's up to, whatever their relationship is or is not, Nahuel will not just leave her here to die. If there's one thing she knows about him, it's that. It sounds like he absconded with this Chu-Hua chick's baby to keep it out of his father's hands, and on the whole Leah approves of that. Now Leah has made the situation epically worse than it already was, and she didn't even know it until it was too late to back out. She keeps the panic at bay by focusing on how much she fucking hates Nahuel's crappy family, and how pissed off she is that she was trapped by them so easily. She won't let her own unforgivable stupidity compromise Nahuel's plans, whatever they are. She will find a way to get out of here on her own, or she will die trying. The one thing she won't do is settle for waiting around to be rescued.

Eventually Chu-Hua starts to stir and moan, and soon after that May comes back into the room and resumes caring for her, singing quietly and stroking her hair. She does not address Leah, who sits in a corner and watches. She is not sure where May falls in the grand scheme of things. She was the only one to defend her brother's actions or to show any form of sympathy for Leah and Chu-Hua, but she also comes off as kind of a weakling compared to the overbearing Serena and the self-assured Jennifer. It doesn't matter that she's not as bad as her sisters; she's still on their side.

However, she's also the only one making any effort to see to Leah's physical needs, which makes her the good cop if nothing else. She provides a bucket and a roll of toilet paper, twisting her mouth apologetically but saying nothing as she hands them over. A few hours later, May leaves for a few minutes and then comes back with two trays of food, one holding soft squishy foodstuffs which she spoon-feeds to Chu-Hua, one holding a tunafish sandwich and a bag of chips for Leah. There is also a paper cup full of water.

Leah is famished in spite of her anxiety, but she forces herself to eat slowly, to make it last. Thank goodness she does; on her third cautious bite into the sandwich, her teeth encounter something not made of food. Leah puts down her sandwich and pulls a tiny scrap of paper from between two pieces of lettuce. It reads,

_Nahuel told me you are too strong for a human. If so, don't let them see it and you may survive._

She peeks up at May, who hasn't noticed either her or the note. Until she knows who wrote it, she shouldn't assume anything about anyone's trustworthiness or lack thereof, so she surreptitiously stuffs the note in her mouth and swallows it quickly. Then she goes back to eating her sandwich, and she and May ignore each other equally.

* * *

><p>Leah loses track of time in that windowless room. At first she drives herself crazy thinking about Nahuel and that baby, about Jake and the Cullens. Her parents are probably starting to worry about her by now. She told them she was leaving town but they would expect at least a few texts or a quick phone call. Leah wonders if they've started looking for her yet. They'll start in Winnipeg, since she told Jake she was there. But Winnipeg is far from wherever she is now. Leah curses herself yet again for diverting resources from the search for Nahuel.<p>

Her jailers aren't starving her but she's hungry all the time anyway; her appetite never wanes, and she could easily consume ten times what they provide. Leah finds herself pacing the perimeter of the small room, wearing a track around the edges of the carpet, just so that her muscles don't atrophy. She wishes she could fight someone, build up her strength again, but she's pretty sure one of these chicks'll just bash her in the head with a two-by-four if she gets too uppity. Leah settles for doing as many push-ups and squats as she can when left alone with Chu-Hua. She can feel her strength growing, faster than such paltry diet and exercise should account for. Save when sleeping, she is never anything less than aggressively angry, and her fever never breaks.

Leah eavesdrops whenever she can, if for no other reason than that there is nothing else to do around here. She never really picks up new information, though. Most of it is Serena being a bitch to May, or Jennifer trying to act like everything they're doing isn't totally awful and illegal. Leah gathers that Jennifer is the youngest of the three, that Serena is the eldest and raised May but did not enjoy the task, and that May is more timid than a bird trying to fly for the first time. May might be pretending, hiding her strength from her sisters. Any one of them might be pretending.

Leah's only solid connection to the passing of time is in Chu-Hua's face, which slowly regains a more healthy color and fills out under May's care. Sometimes, as the days go on, Leah even hears the two talking together quietly, in what sounds like Chinese.

One day, Serena storms into the bedroom/prison cell and jerks Leah to her feet, ignoring May's nervous protestations. She tightens a zip-tie around Leah's wrists, drags her through the house and pushes her out the front door. Jennifer is waiting on the lawn; May remains in the bedroom with Chu-Hua. Leah squints against the sudden daylight, which burns her corneas something fierce in spite of the overcast sky.

"Take her, Jen," orders Serena. "She reeks. I don't want it getting on me."

Jennifer picks Leah up in a fireman's carry, and she and Serena begin to run.

At first Leah is too busy trying to worm free of the zip-ties to notice her surroundings. But she gradually becomes aware that Jennifer's speed exceeds distance-running, jogging and normal sprinting; even burdened with Leah's dead weight, Jennifer is flying along at maybe twenty miles per hour. And they keep up that pace for a long, long time. Leah gives up on her zip-ties and then, a few minutes later, gives up on giving up. She is sure that she could break them if she could only get a little leverage, but that's not happening. She tries gnawing through them and manages to weaken the plastic in a few places.

Finally they stop. Leah is dropped unceremoniously on a particularly hard patch of ground and left there, while Jennifer and Serena walk around and whisper together. Leah rises awkwardly to her feet and tries to thump some feeling back into her legs, stomping around until calves and thighs begin to tingle again. She stretches out her arms as much as the zip-ties will let her. She tries again to split the bonds, but her arms are floppy and weak from dangling. So she just tries to pump blood back into them as best she can.

Having seen to her most pressing physical needs, Leah takes stock of her surroundings. There's not much to see; she's in a field of cold, hard, sparse grass. The sky is gunmetal gray. The air is cool and dry. There is nothing alive for miles. There are no trees or bushes to offer cover should Leah attempt to run; and besides, one of the sisters always keeps her in sight. This might be her best chance to escape, but she'll have to wait till the sisters are distracted.

Leah is thirsty and, as usual, very hungry. The wind picks up and she arches against it, wanting to relieve some of her fever. Her throat has been closed up for days, not in the getting-sick kind of way, more in the furiously-trying-not-to-cry way, although Leah couldn't cry now if she tried. She wishes the voices would come back to keep her company. What she wouldn't give to hear Tadi and Jake arguing in her subconscious! But there's nothing to hear except the wind.

She gnaws on her bonds again, turning away from her captors, sitting on the ground and hunching over to hide what she['s doing. She manages to wear the zip-tie down so thin in one place that she should be able to tug it apart pretty easily, when the time comes. Until then, she decides to leave her manacle in place so that Serena doesn't simply replace it with a fresh one.

They stay out here for what feels like a long time, although in the absence of shadows it's hard to tell. Serena's cell phone buzzes, and she takes a call. She walks out of earshot, but Leah hears her whispering to Jennifer that Nahuel and their father are on their way. Leah's heart kicks like a horse at that. She's going to see Nahuel again. She's actually going to see him again. She's still alive enough to see him, but she's not sure she can ask him to rescue her like this. She should have rescued herself already. She promised herself she would. She can't let him trade an innocent baby for her dumb ass.

There is a distant rustling that reaches Leah on the wind. They are coming. Her face grows warm and then hot, her hands start to shake, and she finds herself reflexively grinding her teeth. Leah's vision is going funny: colors seem to flicker and run together, though shades and lines remain constant. Her nose twitches with sensitivity. When a fly whizzes past her face, she can feel the breeze generated by its wings, separate from the wind already blowing. She hears its wingbeats not as an indistinct whine but as a series of high-pitched clicks. Her sense of time does not speed or slow, but for a second she can actually see each individual beat of its wings before it flies away. She can see everything happening. _Everything_.

On the horizon, a small group approaches. As they draw near the prisoner, Leah can start to pick out details. She identifies Jake, Nahuel, Jae, and a man she doesn't recognize but who can only be Nahuel's taint of a father. The stranger is pale-skinned and dark-bearded, tall, barrel-chested and powerful. His skin shimmers in a way that makes Leah dizzy; he seems to be faintly glowing. Leah next wastes a few precious seconds gazing hungrily on Nahuel's face and form, so familiar to her but still startling in its beauty and poise. Then, with a thrill of delight and relief, Leah notices a fifth figure, following behind the main group.

Tadi has come. Leah feels a swelling irrational conviction that whatever happens now, she will be safe. Tadi will always see her safe.

The barrel-chested man breaks from the group and runs, impossibly fast, over to Leah. His smell, diluted by the open air but pungently unpleasant, precedes him: spoiled fruit, rotten flowers. Leah grits her teeth, her whole body quivering with the desire to run headlong toward this sick son of a bitch and tear his head off. Her hands tremble so hard her zip-tie nearly snaps. It is a struggle merely to keep from screaming.

"Where is the infant?" asks Serena when Joham reaches them.

"Change of plans," says Joham. His voice is low but somehow shallow-sounding, like he has a head cold. "The infant is gone. We have won a greater prize today." He grabs Leah firmly by the arm and begins to drag her back out into the empty space between the two groups. Nahuel and Tadi approach them, and they meet in the middle.

No. No, no, no. Leah looks at Nahuel, but his head is bent and he will not return her gaze. It can't be this way. He can't possibly mean to—

"Don't do it," she manages to say through clenched jaw. Nahuel glances up at her for a brief instant, then looks down again. He doesn't speak.

"As we agreed," says Tadi. "And you will relinquish all claim on the infant."

"As agreed," says Joham. The place where his hand grips Leah's arm burns and sweats. "If Nahuel tries to renege, I will consider all agreements off. Understand, boy?"

"I understand," says Nahuel quietly, still looking down.

"Try it again," growls Joham.

Nahuel looks up at his father. "I understand, sir," he says again, with exaggerated humility.

_I can't let you do this_, Leah thinks frantically. _I am not worth this_.

Joham reaches out and lazily cuffs Nahuel across the side of the face. His movement is quick and sure and efficient, and he doesn't appear to have struck Nahuel very hard, so Leah is shocked to see blood spring up almost immediately from his cheek.

"You'll not be insolent to _me_, boy," says Joham menacingly. Then he hawks a glob of silvery spit into Nahuel's eye. It slides down his cheek and neck and soaks into the collar of his shirt, leaving an oily-looking track on his face, like a slug trail.

Nahuel does not respond. He doesn't even flinch, not even when Serena breaks out in mocking titters across the field. Was this, too, a part of the deal he stuck to free her? That he should take every humiliation thrown his way, that he should make no move to fight back?

Very well. With a sudden sense of clarity and purpose, Leah realizes that she will simply have to fight for him.

She takes in a mighty lungful of Joham's noisome stench, holds it there in her chest, wallowing in it. Every drop of feverish blood in her veins is replaced by molten rage. She takes another deep whiff of that foul odor and feels an expansion down low at the base of her spine. It's just like when she met Bella, but she's not panicking anymore. She's too fucking angry to panic. A hurricane of fury tears through her body, pushing her out of herself. Leah's rage claws its way up her throat. She holds her body tight around that hurricane, waiting for her moment.

Joham is hanging onto her, unaware of the meltdown in his hands, ready to hand her over to Tadi. And Leah has had enough. She will not be traded like livestock. She will not be manhandled by this monster for another instant. And she will not allow him to humiliate his son. Leah digs her heels into the hard ground. Joham jolts in surprise, looks down at her. He tightens his grip on Leah's wrist and bares his teeth, letting out a low growl to let her know who's in charge. But Leah is not intimidated. Her body is a fault line over a lake of magma. All she has to do is _shift_…

Her rage explodes out of her, built up over weeks and months to a deadly magnitude. Her soft skin splits away to be replaced by a shaggy pelt as thick and tough as armor. Her blunt human teeth are forced aside by two-inch curved ivory skewers, and the wrist Joham is holding is no longer wrist at all, but a forepaw, hairy and massive, armed with claws like knives. Her vision ceases to fluctuate, and settles into a blue-and-purple understanding of sight that has more to do with movement than shape. She can see and attack faster than Joham can react: she rounds on him, bringing two paws the size of shovels up to his shoulders like a dog going in for a kiss. Her snout, a foot long and dangerously pointed, yawns wide. With the strength of a crocodile she closes her teeth on Joham's face, crunches through his flesh and skull as easily as biting through a peanut, and twists. With a flick of her muscled hairy neck, Leah sends Joham's face flying through the air. It has not even landed before she is worrying the rest of his skull free from his spinal column. Rivulets of silvery, acidic liquid pour from his gaping neck, dribble down Leah's giant face.

She bats Joham's twitching body to the ground and plants her two front paws on it. A familiar-smelling beast appears first in her ears and nose, and then in her field of vision; and she does not have to be told to know that it is Jake. He begins systematically yanking Joham's limbs free of his body, while Leah uses her weight to hold the unmoving torso down. She wonders distantly if this scene will give her nightmares, later on. In the moment, she feels no stronger emotion than pride in a job well done.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Nahuel intercepting Jennifer and holding her off. A third wolf, whom Leah identifies as Tadi without so much as a second thought, has Serena pinned to the ground with one massive forepaw—a formality, surely, for Serena seems to be unconscious. Jennifer is crying somewhere in the background, subdued by Nahuel.

_**Leah, can you hear me?**_

Tadi's voice materializes inside her head. Leah knows instinctively how to answer her.

_I hear you, Tadi._

_**Joham has a group of backup fighters to the north. Jae and Jake, come with me; we will head off Joham's goons. Leah, you stay here and guard Serena. If she tries to escape, kill her; otherwise, let her live. I will be in touch.**_

In moments, the wolves are gone.

Leah lopes over to Serena. She circles the prone young woman, smelling and listening. Serena's eyes are closed and all of her major joints seem to be dislocated, which is probably why she isn't running away. Just to be safe, Leah settles her whole body on top of Serena's, her front paws on the girl's shoulders, hindquarters comfortably pinning down those white legs. She is so much more massive than this girl, even sitting, that Serena almost disappears beneath Leah's bulk. Serena twitches feebly, but with all her limbs out of joint she really is quite helpless to move. Leah bends her head and thoughtfully licks some blood from her forearm.

Jennifer's vibrating sobs grow to a loud wail and attract Serena's notice. Her face a mask of white-hot fury, she glares over at Nahuel and Jennifer, who stand together a few yards away. Leah glances over too. She can't really tell them apart by sight, but she hears Nahuel's voice coming from one of the figures, addressing the other in exactly the same tone one might use to calm a skittish dog.

With Leah momentarily distracted, Serena makes a desperate bid for freedom, jolting herself out from under Leah's weight with surprising force. She struggles a few yards before Leah leaps on her, and then swipes at Leah's flank with sharp-nailed fingers. Leah, not as used to this four-legged body as to the bipedal model, yelps in surprise and pain as she loses a strip of furry flesh to Serena's raking blow. But Leah gives the pain no more than a second's notice before reaching out to neatly scoop Serena's right eye from its socket with a single claw. Serena collapses, screaming, blood flowing freely from her ruined eye-socket, and Leah settles onto her once more, haunches rounded and fore-paws stretched out before her like a Sphynx. She laps up the eye from the cold ground with her tongue, and swallows it whole.

Serena makes no further escape attempts, and even Jennifer's whimpers subside into frightened silence after this. Distantly, almost academically, Leah reflects on what she's just done. If she ever becomes human again, will the memory of this scene replace the deaths of Sam and Emily in her tortured subconscious? Will this become her new nightmare? Will she even feel remorse? She just murdered a man. She just orphaned these girls.

She just orphaned _Nahuel_.

Leah looks over at him, and his eyes meet hers steadily; but she is not a human, now, and can no longer read anything in his expression.


	11. Worth It In The End

**Thank you for reading, dears! I hope you'll let me know what you think of the story, now that we're at the end.**

* * *

><p>Leah hears a few more voices over the next ten minutes. She hears Tadi communicating with Jae and Ard, giving them instructions. A few times, she sees glimpses of a battle being wrapped up somewhere out of sight. Jake is the first of the wolves to hurry back toward Leah nd Nahuel. His mental voice crows with excitement at Leah's transformation, and the exhilaration of fighting. He somehow succeeds in transmitting information that can't be understood through hearing: he shares a scent directly with her brain, and a gray flicker of rabbit darting out of his path. She doesn't know how he does his, but when she instinctively tries to return the favor and convey to him the fast-dissipating aroma of burning Joham-flesh, she feels him mentally flinch with distaste, and know it worked.<p>

One thing is sure: being a wolf means absolute certainty. Leah does not have a single worry inside of her. If something bad happens, she'll either deal with it or be killed. What's there to worry about?

Soon the rich peat-y scents of the other wolves and the sour smell of Joham's kind wafts across Leah's nostrils. She sees movement at the edge of the field, and counts half a dozen figures racing toward her. She knows which wolf is which without trying. There are also two humanoid creatures with them, but Leah knows automatically that they are not human. In fact, no one here is human.

Not even Nahuel.

Leah wonders if that will bother her, once she stops being a wolf.

**_Leah, let Emmett handle Serena._**

A large vile-smelling male humanoid stands over Leah and Serena. Leah yawns again and stretches, digging her front claws into Serena's shaking shoulders as she raises her haunches high. Then she lopes over to greet her new pack. Tadi bows her snout graciously to be licked by Leah, and then Jake and Jae and Ard alternate smelling her hindquarters and being sniffed in return. All four of the other wolves have little lumps attached to their legs, lumps which carry the only human smell for miles. Jake bounces around Leah a few times, his tail high and his chest pressed to the ground, and Leah pounces on him so that they both go rolling. Then, distracted, Leah follows an interesting scent trail toward a rabbit warren. After that she sprints in a few large circles, and then she goes over to stand at Tadi's side, taking pleasure and comfort from the knowledge that wherever Tadi is, whatever Tadi says, Leah must follow.

The three bipedal non-humans take charge of Serena and Jennifer, and Leah follows Tadi and the others toward the east. Leah runs steadily with the other wolves, all human sense of time dismissed until she needs it again. She knows they run long enough for her legs to start feeling loose and warm, and the pads of her feet to feel sore. But she doesn't mind this. She just wants to be with her pack.

The sun is starting to cast long, skinny shadows before they stop. The sour unpleasant smell of Joham's kind is stronger around here; Leah turns her head in the direction of the reek's highest density, and sees a large house on the horizon, glowing in the last of the evening sun.

**_Leah, to drop your phase, you must do the opposite of what you did before. Let the wolf part blow away. It's all right if you can't do it yet. There is no hurry._**

The three male wolves shiver back into their naked, pink human bodies, their backsides to her. Their human nudity has no more effect on Leah than it did when they were wolves, but soon they all extract articles of clothing from the lumps tied to their legs, and put on shorts and shirts. Then they all jog off toward the house, joking and talking together, anticipating dinner and a bit of sleep.

Tadi remains wolflike, thinking calm encouragement at Leah. Leah's not convinced she wants to stop being a wolf. She's pretty sure she knows how to do it—just pull all her molecules in tight around her, like she did when she met Bella and she was fighting the change. But it's so pleasant being a wolf and not a human. Everything is nicer this way—not simplistic, but simple.

Still, Leah wants to please Tadi, and so she does as asked. It takes her a few tries, because she is mentally trying to put off the moment of transformation. But she does it, feels the cells of her limbs origami back into human shape, feels her razor-teeth smooth and diminish, sees the full spectrum of hue and line reenter her conception of sight. And then she is standing alone in a field with Tadi, naked and human once more.

She regrets it almost instantly.

Tadi wriggles out of her wolf skin even more quickly and smoothly than Leah, and pulls some articles of clothing from the little bag tied to her leg. Leah's clothes are all miles behind her, no doubt ruined. But Tadi offers Leah a cotton shirt and shorts from her bag, reserving only a bra and panties for her own use. Leah snuggles into the shirt. It smells like Tadi, and Tadi smells like trust, and home, and family.

Tadi stands in front of Leah and looks into her eyes as tenderly as a mother.

"You've done well, dearheart," she says. Nothing more, but Leah needs no more. She slumps gently forward into Tadi's welcoming embrace, and breathes and breathes, till her breaths turn to sobs and she is dripping a confusion of sadness and joy and love and fear and loyalty onto Tadi's bared bosom. Tadi's warm hands rub circles around Leah's shoulders. Leah cries until she feels whole again.

It takes less time than she'd ever have imagined.

* * *

><p>"So, by 'werewolves' Nahuel really meant <em>werewolves<em>," Leah says after she's cried herself out several times over.

"Yes," says Tadi, taking Leah's hand and walking slowly with her toward the distant house. "Nahuel wasn't supposed to tell you. We don't let people know unless they've already figured it out, or they're going to be directly affected. It's dangerous to know too much about this side of things, if you don't have to."

"This side of things," echoes Leah.

"The wolves. The leeches."

Leah's heard Tadi and Jake mention _leeches_, but not until this moment does the full meaning of the word dawn on her. "They're vampires," she says bluntly. "That's why Em and Sam and Uncle Bill were all drained of blood."

Tadi nods solemnly. "Yes," she says. "I'm sorry about all of this, Leah. I've made such a hash of your first time. At first we didn't know it was you, and then when we tried to test it it seemed like it _couldn't_ be you. Getting near Bella should have made you phase. I have no idea why it didn't work, or why it _did_ work when you got near Joham. Bella does not drink human blood; perhaps that tempered her affect on you."

"Bella had plenty affect on me. I think I...stopped it," says Leah slowly. "Nahuel was helping me." Tadi makes an incredulous noise in the back of her throat, and Leah hastens to add, "I don't think he knew that that was what he was doing. He'd been getting me used to it for months."

"'It'?"

"My body. Self-control," Leah says. "I think. I would always get these fevers, and I would become really mean and aggressive, but only against him. He...let me. He let me take all my aggression out on him. I learned a lot. I didn't know I was learning, but I was. I learned how to keep myself from flying to pieces. When I saw Bella, I wanted to just rip apart at the seams, but Nahuel was standing right there and it helped me focus. I was just barely able to run away. If he hadn't been standing right next to me...maybe I would've turned months ago."

They walk in silence for a few minutes. Leah watches the gray countryside and lets herself face the one thought she most wishes she could keep at bay: there were no humans in that field today. Wolves, and vampires, but not one human.

"So, he's half vampire, huh?" she says quietly. "On his dad's side?"

"He's half-vampire," Tadi confirms. "His father has been experimenting on human women for centuries."

"I knew his dad did...something like that. I didn't know it was like this. I thought he was exaggerating."

"I used to think Nahuel could take any secret to the grave," says Tadi ruefully. "And here he gave you his life story in a span of two months."

"I don't think he told me anything he wasn't supposed to. Other than the werewolf bit, that is, and obviously I didn't believe it at the time. He more just gave me...hints. I thought he was making it up. We weren't all that close."

"Perhaps," says Tadi thoughtfully.

"So are you, like, some sort of wolf queen or what?" says Leah after a small pause.

Tadi laughs. "Hardly," she says. "We are a family. I simply happen to be the oldest, and the best at making tactical decisions in the heat of battle. When we fight, I am Alpha. And sometimes I am compelled to make decisions for the pack that have nothing to do with battle, but that happens rarely. We all have our particular strengths. You'll see. If you...if you want to." She sounds suddenly shy, her smooth brown cheeks reddening.

"I want to do whatever you want me to do," says Leah sincerely. The moment she scraped Joham's face away from his skull was the moment she found her purpose in life. Her old life has dropped easily away from her. She doesn't want a job, or money, or boyfriends. She wants to be a part of this strange little family, fighting and eating and joking and living alongside them. She wants to be Tadi's daughter-sister-friend. She wants to be a wolf. Everything else will work itself out.

Soon they reach the house, and Tadi heads inside in search of proper clothing. Walking around to the back of the house, they find a great number of people milling around and talking. Tadi and Jae and Ard, but also what can only be a family of vampires. They all have eyes in varying shades of brown, some almost black, some quite yellow.

Leah takes a deep breath, and while it is unpleasant and makes her wrinkle her nose several times, there is no longer any danger of her being overpowered by it. What more can that smell do to her, anyway? She's already turned into a werewolf. When she finally transformed, this dangerous reek was also transformed, divested of its power to destroy her equanimity and provoke her to rage. Now it is merely another scent marker, a means of conveying information about bodies and moods. Unpleasant, but no threat to her sanity. Leah has a sudden insight into how a dog must feel, sniffing a pile of shit which a human would find unacceptably offensive. Being a part-time wolf really is simpler. At least, it's giving her perspective.

Jake greets Leah with a plate full of food from a well-stocked table in the kitchen, and she is more than happy to help him eat it. Then he stays by her side, helps her stick names to the faces around her, and soon waves Bella Swan over. Bella greets Leah shyly, with a brief handshake and a wary smile. She introduces her boyfriend Edward (she calls him her mate, which is kind of weird), and their young daughter Laelia. The little girl, barely more than a toddler, is as flawlessly beautiful as everyone here, and she smells more like Nahuel's sisters than anything else. She also smells like dirt and Cheerios and glue, which is oddly reassuring. Laelia makes Leah sit down to eat, and braids her long hair with fingers that are unnaturally deft for such a little kid.

"Okay," says the small child, her hands on her hips, surveying her handiwork with a critical eye. "You're pretty now, 'cept for all the blood on you." Leah's hand flies guiltily to her face and encounters a smear of dried blood. No one else here is crusted with filth, not even the other wolves, and she suddenly feels rude for appearing like this. Somewhere in the back of her mind is the thought that when Nahuel finally shows up-_if_ he shows up-she doesn't want him seeing her like this. So she excuses herself and wanders into the house, looking for a bathroom.

The first door she tries is a closet. The second is another closet. The third is a pantry. This house is nothing but storage. She tries a door at the end of a carpeted hallway, and it opens onto an actual room.

Sitting in a rocking chair is a blonde vampire woman sitting in a wooden rocking chair, her arms curled around a small breathing bundle. She looks up as Leah pokes her head in, and smiles.

"Come in," she whispers. "You must be Leah."

"How'd you know?" says Leah. "Who are you?"

"I'm Rosalie," says the blonde woman. "And I'd have to be daft not to know who you are. You're the one who killed Joham. You've made the world a safer place for Samantha. I'd kiss you if I didn't think that would freak you out. Hey, want to meet her?"

Leah closes the door softly behind her and walks over to the rocking chair. This is her first sight of the baby whose very existence threw her life into such upheaval. If she hadn't been born, Nahuel would never have needed to rescue her from his father, and Leah would never have been trapped by his psychotic sisters...would never have phased for the first time. Would never have known who she is, what she is.

"Samantha, huh?" she whispers. "I owe you one." She bends over the swaddled form and touches a careful finger to the soft black fuzz atop the wee head. "She's so tiny," she marvels. Samantha lets out a miniscule squeak and purses her lips like a little fish. Rosalie reaches for a bottle sitting in a bottle-warmer on the floor next to the rocking chair, and plants it in her mouth.

The bottle is full of blood.

"She was very premature," says Rosalie. "I know more about half-vampire babies than anyone else in the world. When Bella got pregnant, I dropped everything and just studied the pregnancy. When Laelia was born, I kept learning from her. So Nahuel asked me to help. It was very touch-and-go, for a while. I didn't have all my equipment, and her lungs weren't strong. But she's stable now. The mother also did poorly, but I'm told she's recovering. She'll be here soon, I think. She's never met Samantha properly." There is a little catch at the back of her words, but her face remains serene as she feeds the girl.

"She..._we_ have you to thank, Leah," Rosalie goes on. "I would have done anything to keep Joham out of her life. Chu-Hua—that's her mother—she already has a family. She has a husband, her own children. Joham did this to her against her will, because he knew he could...breed her." Rosalie shudders delicately. "A man who will do that does not deserve any mercy. He meant for her to die, so that no one would be left to contest his claim on the child. But Chu-Hua lives. Samantha's mother lives, and her father does not. There are not words enough to express my joy at knowing she will be safe from that evil man."

"If I hadn't gotten my dumb ass kidnapped in the first place, you would've had a lot less to worry about," says Leah ruefully.

"Perhaps, perhaps not," says Rosalie. "Joham is wily. As long as he lived, he would have made trouble for us, and Chu-Hua would never again have been safe. Nor would Samantha."

"Nahuel's the one you should really be thanking," mutters Leah. "He was going to…" She finds she can't finish. Rosalie places an icy hand on Leah's shoulder.

"When I see him, I will be sure to thank him," she says gently. "Thank you _both_. And how is Nahuel doing?"

Leah can do no more than shrug.

"So, Samantha, huh?" says Leah, watching blood vanish at a mighty rate into the little creature.

"That's what I call her," says Rosalie sheepishly. "Her mother will name her properly. I thought if this little one had a name...even just a temporary one…" She trails off, gazing at Samantha's perfectly round face with an expression of profound sadness and care.

Leah figures Rosalie could use some time alone with the baby she's obviously bonded with and will shortly be forced to say goodbye to, so she continues her quest for a bathroom. She finds one upstairs and takes a long, hot shower, then sits on the toilet in Tadi's shirt reading _Architectural Digest_ until her butt falls asleep. Then she goes back downstairs; she is still standing on the bottom step when she hears a commotion coming from the nursery. There is a powerful smell of blood and urine, and Leah almost recoils. She recognizes that smell. Chu-Hua, her fellow prisoner, must be here, although why or how Leah has no idea.

Rosalie's voice drifts out into the hall, pleading. "I don't understand," she is saying, sounding close to tears. "Why won't she take her? She's _perfect!_"

"She's _his_," answers Maysun's familiar voice, low and urgent. "Rosalie, I told you this might happen. You cannot force her to take the child. She _has_ a family. How can she go back to Lian and say, 'Hello, meet the child of another man, love him as your own'? The pregnancy was terrible for her. You know she tried to end it twice. Seeing the baby now does not change any of that. Should she take Samantha, she would be reminded every day of what Joham did to her. Even if she grew to love her, she would never have peace."

The enormous vampire dude with curly brown hair (Emmett, she thinks Tadi called him) passes by the stairwell where Leah is standing, and enters the nursery. He closes the door behind him, and Leah moves on down the hallway.

She wanders through the house, her nose wrinkling every time she comes across a particularly pungent pocket of vampire-stink. The one scent she most longs to encounter is absent. Leah is both desperate and dreading to see Nahuel again. She just killed his father and blinded his sister. She has no idea if those actions will count as marks for or against her. She is terrified to find out, but compulsion drives her onward. Most of the people who were here earlier have scattered, although the pack has taken over a basement rec-room and begun a battle of ping-pong.

Leah goes outside. There are so many stars here, more than enough to light her way. And there is something else out here, too, the scent she's been looking for, which reveals itself as a path for her to follow.

At the end of it is Nahuel.

He is standing alone, two miles from the house, under a lonely stand of trees. He turns to face Leah as soon as he hears her, and she finds herself stumbling over her own feet as she jogs the last few yards toward him. He isn't smiling.

"Nahuel," she says, "I, um…"

"You killed my father," he says in a painful voice. "You killed him like it was nothing."

"I'm sorry, Nahuel," she says, her heart clenching like a fist. _I did it for you_, she wants to say; but how can she say such a thing without heaping insult onto the pain he must already be feeling? How could she have presumed to solve his problems-her problems-everyone's problems-by killing his dad?

And yet, in the moment, her way forward was simple. Leah tries to hold on to the clarity she felt as Joham's face came off in her teeth. It was the right thing to do. It must have been.

"Sorry doesn't change a thing," he says, and Leah feels suddenly cold in this night wind.

"Nahuel, I'm so...I didn't think you would…" How can she go on?

"Didn't think I would what?" he says. "Didn't think I would _mind?_ Are you fucking _high_, merdinha?"

"Didn't think you would _sacrifice yourself_ like a _fucking moron_," she spits, stung. Her arms wrap themselves around her ribcage. The wind blows through Tadi's t-shirt like it isn't even there. Leah wonders if it was a mistake to come out here all alone. Perhaps she should have asked Jake to talk to Nahuel first.

Nahuel doesn't say anything for a long, long moment. Then he punches Leah in the face.

She reels back, dizzy from the blow, her arms windmilling automatically for balance. She shakes it off as quickly as she can, just in time to deflect another punch, this time to her ribs. Nahuel lays into her so completely that she can't even think of going on the offense; it is all she can do to keep him from breaking something she really needs.

"You _killed him_," he is muttering, again and again, "like it was _nothing_." One swing misses and throws him off balance, and Leah takes the opening: she ducks under his arm and kicks his knees out from behind. He rolls as he lands, but Leah flings herself on top of him to keep him off-kilter. He twists and snarls underneath her like a feral cat, and she clings to him, kneeing and scratching where she can, hindering him so he can't hit her any more. She feels like one solid bruise.

"Like it was _nothing_," he grunts, driving his knee up between her thighs. Leah, battered and bleeding, is surprised by a surge of wetness where his thigh meets her crotch, and in her surprise forgets to defend herself. He pounds his fist into the side of her ribcage, and all the air goes out of her and something important cracks in her torso. Before she has gotten her breath back, he has grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her head back, and his lips are at her throat, his teeth ripping through flesh. With one fist Nahuel presses roughly against Leah's cracked rib, and the other nearly snaps her neck, yanking her head back by the hair. Leah lets out a little yelp of pain, and Nahuel responds by shoving his fist harder into her tender side. His lips and tongue move against the gash in her neck. She can feel the blood flowing from the vein to his mouth, a perversion of breastfeeding. She wonders if he means to drain her dry, and if there's anything she can do to prevent it getting to that point.

But Nahuel has been careful to miss the artery, and the flow of Leah's blood is steady but slow. When he finally pulls his face away from her throat, the bottom half of it face is dark and wet, and Tadi's shirt is sticking to Leah's entire shoulder.

"You killed him," he whispers through shiny red lips. "You killed him."

"I'd fucking do it again," she whispers back, her hand clamped tight over the wound in her neck. Nahuel spits at her, and she turns her head just in time; a glob of bloody saliva hits her hair and oozes slowly into her ear.

Now Nahuel flips her over, so that the hard, dry grass cuts into her back. He rips her t-shirt over her head and greedily licks the blood from her skin, one hand pinching the hell out of her nipple, the other hand scooping down past the waistband of her shorts. Leah arches against him, dizzy and lightheaded, and reaches down to wrap her hand around his erection. He's so hard it makes her hurt just to think of it. He jerks abruptly against her hand once or twice, looking pained; and then he slaps her hand away and tugs her shorts down to her knees, and buries his face in her labia with a desperate moan. While he's down there, Leah runs her fingers over the gash he put in her neck, and is relieved that it's not worse; still, she has no idea how much blood she just lost, or whether he present light-headedness is due to blood loss or shock or arousal. Then Nahuel's activities, which have begun to include the adroit application of multiple fingers to multiple orifices, drive all cogent thought from her mind, and she is incapable of doing anything but whimper at an increasing volume and speed.

A moment before she can come, Nahuel pulls away. Leah's eyes pop open, and she stares down at him, dazed and uncomprehending. But he hasn't stopped, merely paused: he is positioning himself between her legs, rubbing the bulging tip of his cock against her, dipping it an inch or two in. He works it against a particularly attentive spot inside her, and spreads his free palm over her swollen genitals, and presses and kneads until she comes crashing down around him.

Leah struggles free of the euphoria of this climax more quickly than she'd like to, because there's something she knows she must do, and she has to do it _now_, before she loses her nerve. She shoves against Nahuel with both hands, so that he flies backward and lands on his back with a thud. Leah doesn't let him rise before sitting on his cock like she owns it, sinking all the way onto it in one sure movement. Nahuel rewards her with an agonized gasp.

Leah begins to rock her hips, one hand pressing Nahuel into the dirt, the other holding on to him, controlling his angle of entry. She leans forward, so her lips are inches from his ear.

"I killed him," she whispers. "I killed him. He's dead, Nahuel."

"You killed him," he repeats.

"He's dead. He's not coming back." She tries to say it calmly, but the words break on their way out of her mouth. Nahuel repeats them anyway, like a schoolboy learning a lesson.

"He's dead. He's not coming back."

"He's dead and you're alive."

"He's dead," he says, his breath now erratic, his face flushed and sweaty. "I'm alive, I'm...I'm…"

He convulses inside her, and he flings his arms around her waist and curls up into her, every muscle in his body clenching in time to his orgasm. He squeezes her so tightly that one of her ribs, the same one he broke barely ten minutes ago, pops protestingly, and Leah's whole flank erupts in fiery pain. But she does not attempt to shift to a more comfortable position. Nahuel's rhythmic full-body spasms have turned to wracking sobs, and Leah wraps her arms and leg around him and holds him within her, silent and tight.

He starts growing hard again before he's quieted down. Then Leah moves her hips, just the littlest bit, and Nahuel's breath catches and he's suddenly paying quite close attention to only one thing. His hands spread warmly across Leah's back, and he kisses her so gently that _she_ almost starts crying, and they spend a long time after that moving together, again and again. The place where they join together is slick with puddled semen before they are finally forced to take a rest.

They lie, still connected, their arms and legs knotted around each other, covered in dirt and grass and all manner of bodily effusions, and breathe.

"Let's just do this all the time," Leah says softly, smiling a little because she can't help it. "Who needs food and sleep, anyway?"

"Not me," says Nahuel. "I get hungry, I can just eat you."

"And if I get hungry?"

"You can eat me," he says, grinning. "We can take turns."

"What about sleep?"

"Fuck sleep," he says, "I just want you."

"You say that now…" she begins teasingly.

"I mean it," he says, and something in his tone makes her pause, eye his face searchingly. His expression is equal parts hope and uncertainty. Leah realizes, looking at him, that her own feelings could be characterized the same way, and that he's the one who made this possible.

"Yes," she breathes.

"Yes?"

"Yes," she says again, firmly. "I absolutely fucking agree."

Nahuel hides his face against her neck. "Good," he says, his voice little more than a low rumble at her throat. He looks up at her in the dark, his pretty brown eyes lit up like stars, and Leah knows exactly what he is feeling.

Hope and uncertainty.

But mostly hope.


End file.
